121–130 of 324 posts
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> It's also a clear reminder of how so much European utopian aspects (free healthcare, education etc) is run on pure goodwill. Just look at the strike action in the UK with Nurses having seen 15% pay cut (being forced to accept a 5% pay "rise" after much negotiation) and doctors have seen a 21-26% paycut. It's not run on pure goodwill, it's run on taxes. Taxing corporations has been against the zeitgeist of neolibera…
Why are you blaming UK's health crisis on neoliberalism? The NHS is as "socialist" as you could get in Western society.
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I didn’t take tooooo many econ classes but it sure seems like there are a lot of monopolies, oligopolies, and potential cartels these days.
When every company has easy access to the entire world, or at least an entire country, the natural direction is towards far fewer, extremely well-capitalized companies eventually squeezing everybody else out. And we're seeing that in almost every industry, for sure.
Last time I looked into some companies from my home country that were part of daily life in my childhood I see that most have been acquired by a larger corporation, or became corporations with multiple mergers themselves.
It's been happening pretty fast the past 20 years.
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> It's also a clear reminder of how so much European utopian aspects (free healthcare, education etc) is run on pure goodwill. Just look at the strike action in the UK with Nurses having seen 15% pay cut (being forced to accept a 5% pay "rise" after much negotiation) and doctors have seen a 21-26% paycut. It's not run on pure goodwill, it's run on taxes. Taxing corporations has been against the zeitgeist of neolibera…
Why are you blaming UK's health crisis on neoliberalism? The NHS is as "socialist" as you could get in Western society.
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Things I pay a lot for: * Rent (they're all high; and can't afford to buy anywhere near where I work) * Food (prices are pretty much the same everywhere) * Internet (Cable's the only modern-speed option where I currently rent) * Energy / Gas - either utilities or again, the same everywhere I think most everyone else is in the same boat. I can scale down some of these a little bit, but they're all fairly __inelastic__…
A good where consumers have inelastic demand does not mean that individual companies face inelastic demand curves - that's the whole point of competition. ie. It doesn't matter if you're willing to pay a lot to avoid starvation since no individual company is making profits off of having some market power to starve you. The thought that food providers are colluding to raise prices is absurd and should serve as a reduc…
https://www.producer.com/opinion/u-s-government-strikes-out-...
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Unless you tax land. Nobody manufactures that for profit but profit handsomely from it they do.
Taxing land would increase rent and therefore increase food prices.
It's a likely theory. But economics teaches us when a player overcharges, others will step in to undercut and take all the market share. So, we're at a point where we need to admit that mantra isn't true in the modern age, or admit that we've done a terrible job at preventing effective monopolies/duopolies from forming.
> So, we're at a point where we need to admit that mantra isn't true in the modern age, or admit that we've done a terrible job at preventing effective monopolies/duopolies from forming. It's objectively obvious that the latter is true, but why? One of the reasons is regulatory capture. But another is that people have stopped believing the former. Suppose there is a market with an existing duopoly that charges high p…
We've always known that a big guy can come into a small guys party and squish them all. That's why microsoft wasn't allowed to push their browser (OS = big guy, browser market = small guys party).
This is why amazon shouldn't be allowed to sell its own items in its own store, any supermarket really. With their power of scale, these market owners can squish anything they sell in their store, killing competition with it.
Why is this a good explanation now, when 6 months ago it was being pooh-poohed? Take a look at the graphs in this article: https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/dec/10/what-do-high-... The graphs lay out a clear picture of rising corporate profit margins, meanwhile the text is saying to "Ignore the man behind the curtain." What's different today that the WSJ can run this piece today?
The Fed started blowing up banks in its attempt to crush worker wages because when you kill a 1,000,000 plus people, disable countless more, force a bunch of early retirements etc you have to jack up rates super high, super fast to overcome wage increases from the resulting labor shortage. People who read the WSJ work at and invest in banks and don’t like to lose their shirts. So, they’re conceding to a little intern…
Alternatively when you kill a bunch of mostly retired and sick people, perhaps you increase unemployment (nurses and rest home workers freed up) and decrease spending (dead people don’t buy services or goods).
Besides, the total number affected is a very low percent of the population, which is less significant than other economic changes over the previous 20 years.
Without some deeper analysis, your cause and effect is purely hypothetical.
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Things I pay a lot for: * Rent (they're all high; and can't afford to buy anywhere near where I work) * Food (prices are pretty much the same everywhere) * Internet (Cable's the only modern-speed option where I currently rent) * Energy / Gas - either utilities or again, the same everywhere I think most everyone else is in the same boat. I can scale down some of these a little bit, but they're all fairly __inelastic__…
A good where consumers have inelastic demand does not mean that individual companies face inelastic demand curves - that's the whole point of competition. ie. It doesn't matter if you're willing to pay a lot to avoid starvation since no individual company is making profits off of having some market power to starve you. The thought that food providers are colluding to raise prices is absurd and should serve as a reduc…
In the UK there's a company called Virgin Media (broadband, TV, phone provider) which has been completely blatant about it. They recently informed all customers that going forward they will annually be increasing prices by RPI + 3.9%. https://www.virginmedia.com/mobile/annual-rpi-price-increase https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2023/01/virgin-mobile-...
Side note: if you are an O2 customer and a Virgin Media customer you can get your speed bumped up to the next tier for free