Inflation Is:
The high price of gas and groceries caused by retail gouging and corporate grift:
In a so called ‘free market’ economy the ‘profit motive’ is the engine that drives behavior and performance.
Profiting from legitimate business activities and enterprises is as American as apple pie and the flag.
There are some who see making a profit as an element or component of good citizenship and patriotism.
However, there are those who have a different take on the profit motive:
Profiteering is not patriotism. It is not good citizenship.
Aside from being unethical and immoral, knowingly and intentionally making record profits by causing hardship and suffering to befall those who are less well off and without resources, relief, or recourse, profiteering is just about as un-American as it gets.
07/09/2022 @ 11:25 am
As I’ve said multiple times before, capitalism only works well when regulated. Anyone who talks to you about free enterprise will tell you that it’s driven by competition. The problem here is that insufficiently regulated capitaIism forms de facto monopolies, eliminating the competition that makes it work. That’s what’s going on here. What this needs is a lot of antitrust and anti-collusion enforcement.
07/09/2022 @ 11:49 am
Kosh,
…Add a few stern and strategic executive orders…
07/10/2022 @ 9:16 am
There is an extent to which capitalism, at least American capitalism, got redefined. I read recently that that was largely the doing of Jack Welch at GE. Before that, the company was proud of the taxes it paid. He hated paying taxes and was financially successful in doing so, so other companies started emulating him. He turned GE from a manufacturer into mainly a financial company. That’s kind of what happened to America. I can’t tell you exactly where we got the idea that responsibility to stockholders trumped responsibility to the company itself, the customer base, and the general public but that’s where we are now.
Being motivated by profit is fine, Being motivated by money is fine. But wanting to get rich and turning into a miser are not the same thing. There is also a difference between money as a tool and money as a yardstick. When we think it’s fine as a yardstick we get in trouble. That’s where we are now, and we elected a President like that.
I’ve probably said this recently, but it still bears repeating. If we compare money to something whose scale we understand better, I used to use time but right now I’m using distance, an inch equals $10,000, such that the average American home in the first quarter of this year sold for about 3’7”, mortgaged of course, and a million dollars happens at 8’4”, Elon Musk is worth more than 330 miles. There is no function in a number like that. From a luxury standpoint, how much would his life change if he were worth a tenth of that? I’m not sure it would change appreciably if he were worth a hundredth. Preserving those kind of numbers by taxing them low isn’t nationally useful capitalism, it’s big dick capitalism. That’s not a principle to run a country on.
Someone on Quora recently put out the question of if one were to redistribute American wealth, what would a progressive suggest it look like? I answered something like this:
Divided by quintile:
Richest 20% of population: 65% of America’s wealth
Next 20%: 22%
Middle 20%: 10%
Next 20%: 2%
Poorest 20%: 1%
This doesn’t look progressive at all. Let’s take a closer look. I based my numbers on the last available figures I had, which are nearly 10 years old. At this point they’re presumably a lot more skewed than they were even ten years ago.
The wealthiest quintile I dropped from 84% (again, they’re probably way higher now, but it isn’t functional wealth) to 65%. After all, recent gains in the American economy have all been at the top. Here’s what that let me do:
The next quintile I doubled.
The middle quintile I a little better than doubled. I think it was at 4 and a fraction percent.
The bottom two I multiplied by ten. In the case of the poorest, ten years ago they were at 0.1%. Right now I think they’re in debt, so they’re actually at negative, so it would way more than multiple their wealth by 10.
So we take the poorest 80% of the population and at a bare minimum double their wealth. Do you have any idea what that would do to the American economy? Do you have any idea what that would do to tax revenues? Do you have any idea what that would do to corporate profits? Do you have any idea what that would do for hiring at living wages? What happens when 40% of the population that could basically afford nothing can now buy new cars and maybe new houses? What happens to medical care? Try to imagine the 1950’s without most of its oppression, though those numbers were probably less skewed than my suggestion, but if I’m working with conservatives I need the possible.
And the strangest thing about what I’m suggesting is that it absolutely supports capitalism. What we’re doing now does not. Put bluntly, if you’re going to be a parasite it’s in your interest to insure the long life of your host. Capitalism is currently killing its host. Sometimes greed is stupid. Sometimes greed is slow motion suicidal. To use an analogy that I’ve used before: if you own a goose that lays golden eggs you don’t feed it less and stop paying its vet bills in the interest of getting richer right now.
07/19/2022 @ 11:22 pm
I got curious tonight so I looked something up really quickly. I know that middle class standard of living hasn’t increased since the Nixon administration but that the wealthy have, so I looked up two things: population growth since 1975 – roughly x 1.5 – and GDP growth since 1975 – roughly x 13. A bit eye opening.
07/23/2022 @ 8:24 am
Kosh, as I’ve said before:
It must be nice to have enough money to never have to worry about having enough money…