Governments broke the supply chain by literally banning many people from working at all and almost shutting down travel in some cases. That's not a failure of capitalism.
How we broke the supply chain
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Re: How we broke the supply chain
#72What’s the moral framework here? Globalization, financialization, and deregulation got you all this good cheap stuff to buy in the first place. If you’re a de—growth proponent it should never have been available. The supply chain crisis is one of the best things that’s ever happened. But if you think it’s actually bad, what’s the argument here? It would be better to have always lived as if in the jaws of a disaster,…
The world if you have something and then take it away is not equivalent to the one in which said thing never existed to begin with.
Before globalized trade each country had more local manufacturing.
Re: How we broke the supply chain
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
One could argue that if we actually committed to market fundamentalism it would work, but price-gouging laws prevent the market from addressing this kind of risk.
Raising the prices of what has been stocked won't feed any more people, it'll just guarantee that the wealthiest won't go without. If you're talking about raising demand in order to raise supply, that implies that the virus will react to that and retreat accordingly. Or that regulations will be relaxed. Or that people will be paid enough to show up to work sick.
That's not necessarily true.
I don't know if this is empirically true in most situations, but you can at least conceive of a situation in which higher prices result in the poor (as a group) having a better chance of obtaining something.
In the limiting case where something costs 1p and you can buy an unlimited amount, someone wealthy can just swoop in and buy literally all of it and throw it in the bin.
Re: How we broke the supply chain
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ahh ha, this is like when I say a Scotsman was rude to me and someone else informs me that it must not have been a true Scotsman, then
If someone lives in Brazil, was born in Brazil and speaks Spanish though there is a reasonable chance that they are in fact not a Scotsman. If there are consistent breadlines, that means someone is giving away a resource at below its value - free markets sort that out very quickly. They turn up for a few days then go away as prices adjust. Persistent problems only crop up when something regulatory is keeping prices d…
You miss the point. No one is saying capitalism will literally cause breadlines. They are saying capitalism has made breadlines needed in some circumstances. These are different things but related.
Re: How we broke the supply chain
#75how "they" broke the supply chain. fixed it for you.
i'm royally fed up of these "how we..." articles when clearly "we" means some other assholes - usually already rich people trying to get richer.
Re: How we broke the supply chain
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I relatively recently read a biography on John D. Rockefeller and this reminds me of some of the things Standard Oil did with rail companies to gain a market advantage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Monopoly_charges_... Rabbithole indeed. Here's notes from a meeting of the HoR Judiciary Committee in 1999, "ANTITRUST ASPECTS OF THE OCEAN SHIPPING REFORM ACT OF 1998": http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/j…
Well there’s your problem right there. Regulatory capture with a heaping helping of crony capitalism.
But you repeat yourself!
Re: How we broke the supply chain
#77A little bit of central planning can go a long way. Nobody was in charge of figuring out how to gracefully shed load at capacity, so when demand went up by 20%, the system overloaded and latency went through the roof. Market fundamentalism (we don't need to plan, the market will do it) obviously screwed up here, but it doesn't follow that everything that the American Prospect hates is actually bad.
What makes you think any central planners would have done a better job predicting our current shortages than the other market participants?
Some companies do a decent job of it internally.
Re: How we broke the supply chain
#78There's nothing in this article that I haven't read elsewhere. But it still only gets things half right. Sure, outsourcing and offshoring to China caused supply shocks for things from Asia, but...potatoes? cooking oil? These things are not shipped from China. There's more going on than international problems. America has plenty internal supply chain problems, too. The causes might be similar, smaller scale, intra-nat…
I think the problem stems from that reducing redundancy and squeezing your labor is the easiest way to reduce costs. Then, when things 'blow up' you get to jack up prices and pocket the money for fixing the problem you created. With the amount of consolidation we currently have, you can't switch to a vendor that does not do this as the easiest way to rise to senior management is to do this. Probably the most comprehe…
I think "stems from" is complicated in this instance by how much changed and how fast. Systems can take only so much change in a set period of time, and we've had a hell of a lot of change in under 2 years.
Populations movements (COVID), combined with personal spending habit changes (things over experiences), combined with who spends money (office -> work from home contributed to the toilet paper shortages), combined with labour market changes, combined with immigration changes (hospitality in Sydney is weird without foreign students and backpackers), combined with a lack of slack in the system (JIT etc), combined with probably hundreds of small law changes played a part in what is happening. That all these happened at once only makes it all the worse.
Re: How we broke the supply chain
#79What’s the moral framework here? Globalization, financialization, and deregulation got you all this good cheap stuff to buy in the first place. If you’re a de—growth proponent it should never have been available. The supply chain crisis is one of the best things that’s ever happened. But if you think it’s actually bad, what’s the argument here? It would be better to have always lived as if in the jaws of a disaster,…
That's the weird part. The argument seems to be that any temporal failure of a system means we need to change the system wholesale. There is no argument for why a different system would be better, merely the belief that the current system has flaws, therefore...
This part confused me:
> bad public policy coupled with decades of corporate greed.
The article mentions a cascading set of changes that move from minor inconvenience (bicycle parts) to minor but more serious inconvenience (french fries being, however tangentially, "food"). Even then, there is no claim that the "have no potatoes" was for all ingredients, and no one went hungry did they? Unless I'm mistaken, no one in the west has yet starved as a result of all this. Happy to be corrected.
A restaurant I go to has variously been out of Lamb, Chicken and Sweet potatoes. I mean, the horror of being forced to eat normal potato wedges over sweet potato wedges was too much for me, but AFAICT I'm still alive.
So it seems like, as you point out, the system has failed to produce the outcome people claim not to want - huge choice variety and abundance - but has instead produced slightly less than huge choice variety at some moments in time. I'm not sold that's a disaster.
Re: How we broke the supply chain
#80Congress meanwhile would rather help billionaires take down the App Store.