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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   31793 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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wants to create public supermarkets (horrible idea all around, supermarket margins are very small)

Then who makes money from the food industry. And this is a very serious question. Farmers are on thin margins, Supermarkets are on thin margins and yet you have manyfold increase in the price from farm to table.

I actually approve this as an experiment. Create couple of stores. Cut direct deals with some farmers in the Midwest, olive oil produces in California, the big corn and wheat mills. Organize distribution and see if you can deliver fresh produce and other staples, pay wages and sell at near cost. And if the whole operation is financially sane - scale it.

Also when will the Dem party figure out that their tactics for stopping Trump like figures don't work as good as they think? People are tired of economic stagnation and hate the establishment.

Then who makes money from the food industry.

Processing and manufacturing adds a great deal of value, the actual industrial part of the food industry is huge.

You also got commodity traders and other middlemen, the people who profit from price volatility, storage, transportation, etc; whom you need to stabilize prices.

Then there's input suppliers, the people that sell farmers seeds and equipment.

And I'm not going to name all the other middlemen like the various distributors, who in turn have their own suppliers and logistical needs.

Food supply chains are at once critical, complex and old, which means that they are very highly regulated, involve a ton of actors and have been optimized to absurdity.

There are ways a public option could actually cut prices, but they all involve unacceptable tradeoffs like compromizing food safety standards, not having reliable output or operating at a loss. Not having to pay taxes (which is advanced here as the main method of savings) is far from enough.

You can actually operate at a loss if you want, the commissaries operated by DeCA seem like an obvious example. But you have to accept one of the tradeoffs. There's simply no beating capitalism at making interchangeable consumer goods cheap, it's the one thing it's incredibly good at.

There's simply no beating capitalism at making interchangeable consumer goods cheap, it's the one thing it's incredibly good at. Food supply chains are at once critical, complex and old, which means that they are very highly regulated, involve a ton of actors and have been optimized to absurdity.

Good rule of thumb is that whenever you look in any complex system in the USA of lately usually you have shitload of rent seeking and not capitalism. I am not sure that the food chain is an exception from this - I already know that farmers have great problem with rent seeking behavior from John Dreeres and Monsantnos of the world.

Good rule of thumb is that whenever you look in any complex system in the USA of lately usually you have shitload of rent seeking and not capitalism.

Why should these be opposed to each other?

Not a market theorist but rent seeking is extracting value and not generating. I have never seen consumers being better off when there is lack of interoperability, DRM, vertical integration, walled gardens, monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, drm on printer ink and other anticompetitive practices.

So it is not the best use of the capital in the society.

No, I just meant why define capitalism in a way that only includes the good things it enables and not the bad.

I see a parallel fault line within socialism, with Syndicalism in conflict with Central Planning. For me, this goes back to the 1973 miners' strike in the UK. The mines were owned by the National Coal Board(NCB), a branch of the government. Much of the coal was sold to the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), another branch of the government. The basic idea of the strike was to raise electricity prices (by government fiat) to get the money for higher coal prices to get the money to pay the miners higher wages. Or just subsidise the NCB out of general taxation. That was the Trades Union perspective, but the Socialist Planning perspective was that the British coal fields were pretty much worked out. Paying high wages for the horrible job of going under the North Sea to mine small amounts of coal from narrow, wet, fractured seams was a bad plan. Much better was to send the miners to work in factories above ground manufacturing things and stuff to trade for coal from places with more favourable geology.

Basically the National Union of Mine Workers was butting heads with the planners in the socialist part of the British economy and seeking rents based on their ability to crash the economy by coming out on strike.

In a capitalist economy, with fragmented private ownership of the means of production, and lacking national trades unions, this specific kind of rent seeking works badly. The employees at one company come out on strike. They win an excessive pay rise. Their employer starts losing money, and goes bankrupt. The workers lose their well paid jobs. Whoops! Both capitalism and socialism suffer from rent seeking and capitalism has some internal defences to it. Capitalists are entitled to say that rent seeking is not narrowly specific to capitalism; they don't have to own it.

Are there actual examples of companies going under because of excessively high salaries? AFAIK unions where they damage companies mostly do it by protecting poor performers.

Studebaker.

Never had a strike, thought they had a great relationship with the workers, highest paid union workers in the industry.

Then times got tough in the early 60s as the Big Three started to squeeze out competitors, there was a Studebaker labor strike in ‘62 which blindsided the management who, again, had rolled over at every opportunity previously and seemed to be under the impression this merited some sort of loyalty. They continued to have labor conflicts throughout the 60s and the company was dead in ‘68.

There were other issues as well, few things are single-factor problems, but high labor costs were either the #1 problem or a major contributing factor.

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