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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   19787 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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Government run grocery stores and slopulism

I am not an American and don't live in NYC, but I've recently been thinking about the news of there being government run grocery stores in NYC. In my mind, NYC is in at least one way a heart of capitalism in the world, so this at least has some symbolic significance. On a more serious note, I find it interesting what the idea that government-run grocery stores would fix anything reveals about its thinkers.

If you speak to most people, even very intelligent ones, they tend to have narrative-driven models of reality. For example, if you go on Reddit, talk to a co-worker or whatever about health insurance companies or grocery stores, they'll often make these entities responsible for high prices for groceries or healthcare, claiming greed, manipulation and dishonesty in some fashion.

While it is absolutely true that these entities operate out of greed and not e.g. compassion, if one looks at the claims, they are often weak at best. Both grocery stores and health insurance companies have rather low margins (typically 1-3% of net margin for grocery stores, 2-5% for health insurers) in most places. The idea that the only thing preventing us from a post-scarcity, food and healthcare-too-cheap-to-meter society are somehow corporations made up of morally abhorrent people seems to quite attractive to a lot of people.

While both grocery stores and health insurance companies do have plenty of issues, my personal view is that they act in as kind of stand-ins for people's rage; between choosing to believe that either:

a. Healthcare is an enormously and ever-more expensive thing in most of the world, with 15-20% of GDP (!) going to healthcare in the US and usually >10% in most developed nations, because people's expectations of healthcare service are ever-rising and people believe that healthcare is a "human right" and the fact that it's such an expensive thing and requires a lot of staff (health services are the number 1 employer in a lot of US states now) means that when you need healthcare, it'll cost you a lot and insurance premiums reflect that. Similarly with grocery stores; food is actually cheaper than ever as measured by % of people's income being spent on it

b. There are evil people colluding to drive up the prices of essential goods

most people choose b.)

Even most smart people! I have some very sharp colleagues who are economically extremely illiterate and I work in quantitative finance, a field where one would hope people understand things about supply and demand.

And this extends to the right as well! Most populists-right movements have been exerting more, not less, command upon the economy; even Mottizens veer into this, seeing working in finance as parasitising upon society rather than allocating where goods and services ought to go.

I think this sort of feel-good, narrative-driven politics is ultimately an issue simply because reality is not narrative-driven; the progression to the modern world has broadly shown that in a lot of cases, reality is random, cruel, senseless, not governed by human-compatible narratively satisfying laws. There isn't necessarily a cabal; a lot of things are driven by emergent phenomena.

However, the "grocery stores are not evil camp" tends to have shitty marketing (perhaps due to not thinking in terms of attractive narratives itself too much) and loses to people like Zoran Mamdani. Indeed, that is broadly the story of populism and demagoguery, which seems to recently have gained a lot of ground in a lot of places in the world. Maybe the internet and especially things like TikTok makes small soundbites do better these days.

I agree with your point overall, but this:

health insurance companies have rather low margins (typically ... 2-5% ...)

Doesn't mean what you'd think it means. Per the ACA, health insurers have a legally mandated minimum loss ratio (ratio of payouts to revenue collected) of 80%. If they don't payout enough to 'justify' their premiums, they're forced to refund the excess, which obviously they never want to do because if the customer is willing to pay that much, which they proved they were by paying that much, refunding it is just leaving money on the table with no upside. The remaining 20% has to be split between operating costs (which will inevitably bloat due to principal agent problems and internal politics) and profit, so 5% might be close to the ceiling of what's possible. Which makes it meaningless as a metric.

To quote an earlier post of mine:

This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law. Without this requirement, loss ratio is a good measure of efficiency; since a company will always try to minimize their expenses (the ones that involve sending checks to other businesses and don't benefit any employees, anyway), high loss ratios just mean there's adequate competitive pressure to keep them lean. But now? Who can say? The number is going to be >80% no matter how much or little competitive pressure they're under. If competition is insufficient, they'll just throw money at doctors and hospitals, because that's the only way they're allowed to raise profit/operating budget (via higher premiums). And if they were, it would look exactly like you're describing.

Is this actually the root cause of healthcare prices exploding? Probably not, but the argument-from-margins doesn't prove it isn't.

When your margin is capped, the only way to increase profit is increasing revenue. Predicted exploding costs means larger premiums means higher revenue.

Okay but you’d still expect competition to try to keep costs low to compete on premiums meaning you’d expect all things equal for insurance companies to want to keep costs low.

But the flip side to that is regulatory complexity means there are large moats to entrance decreasing competitive pressures.

And this extends to the right as well! Most populists-right movements have been exerting more, not less, command upon the economy; even Mottizens veer into this, seeing working in finance as parasitising upon society rather than allocating where goods and services ought to go.

As someone whose wealth comes from quant finance, I would say this is correct. A core part of quant finance is critical to the global economy. But a ton of other stuff is unproductive competition or outright gambling-enabling. Separating the two out is fierce debate but each end of the axis is real.

But you don't even have to talk about complicated financial instruments to see financial parasitism. A lot of people are genuinely too dumb or of poor impulse control to handle credit cards and banks quickly lock up all of their future disposable income. They would 100% have been better off without credit cards since they would simply be broke instead of six figures in debt.

A lot of people are genuinely too dumb or of poor impulse control to handle credit cards and banks quickly lock up all of their future disposable income. They would 100% have been better off without credit cards since they would simply be broke instead of six figures in debt.

They get a bunch of stuff, then they declare bankruptcy and never have to pay for it. This does ruin their credit, but because they're (by assumption) too dumb and/or have poor impulse control, they couldn't have taken advantage of good credit anyway.

A lot of them are too stupid to declare bankruptcy and just make the minimum payments for life, and divert whatever cash windfalls they get towards it. Only to then continue spending into their temporarily freed up credit.

I'm not saying a business that boosts utility today for people with high future discounting rates is inherently bad, but to the degree banks exploit this it borders into illegitimacy, IMO.

The human brain didn't evolve to be so smart for understanding complex emergent behaviors, it's just a fortunate part that our intelligence also allows us to do that. But it's still really hard for us to figure this out, especially from first principles.

Some form of mercantilism or similar systems was basically the default idealogy for very long periods of time across many civilizations, breaking out of that mindset and into free market capitalism was genuinely groundbreaking. Even now the biggest nation in the world, China, is still idealogically controlled by anti market leaders who were dragged into some semblance of proper economics by what might as well have been sheer luck. If not for Deng Xiaoping's market reforms breaking open some of the idea trap they'd likely still be extremely poor.

reality is random, cruel, senseless, not governed by human-compatible narratively satisfying laws. There isn't necessarily a cabal; a lot of things are driven by emergent phenomena.

The Big Bad Evil Who Deserves All The Blame is common everywhere, in all societies. Whether it be the witches who cursed your son to be weird (now understood as autistic), or The Man who controls government and the economy keeping you from being more than a fast food employee, or the Jews conspiring behind doors or 9/11 being an inside job or the secret labs that must have intentionally released dangerous pathogens, everything bad gets pinned on the evil shadow figures because the idea that nature or complex systems like that can just do that is somehow even more terrifying.

Ironically it can even be the people who are trying to help you that become the Boogeyman. Whether it be the Jewish merchants who were blamed for the high prices in black neighborhoods that the other stores refused to even touch (the same way that all "price gouging" complaints work) or foreign aid workers with conspiracies alleging they're responsible for the disaster they're providing aid for, they become the face of the great evil because they're the only face around to blame.

In the same way strongman populism is like the reverse. If Evil Authority is responsible for all the bad in the world, then Good Authority must be able to do all the good. You don't need a person with sound policies that consider those yucky tradeoffs as real, you need a powerful fighter who exposes the illuminati and beats them up.

However, the "grocery stores are not evil camp" tends to have shitty marketing (perhaps due to not thinking in terms of attractive narratives itself too much) and loses to people like Zoran Mamdani.

Isn’t the obvious solution just photoshopping Mamdani's head over Boris Yeltsin's and letting the memes take off? If there's one episode in history that points out the strength of a free market, it's specifically related to grocery stores

It wouldn’t work on the necessary demographic. Mamdani did best among 18 to 29 year olds. For them, Yeltsin is ancient history, completely irrelevant to today; besides which, their education from leftist teachers most likely never included that episode.

I agree with a lot of what you are saying directionally, but

entities operate out of greed

entities don't have greed, individuals do. Which is why low margins by themselves are a poor indicator of whether or not greed is at play. If I am the owner and CEO of MonopolyMart and MonopolyMart posts a five-figure net loss in FY2024 but I, the owner and CEO of MonopolyMart, have a salary of $1 billion, does the low margin indicate that I am not in the business for the money?

We know what happens when the measure is the target.

when you need healthcare, it'll cost you a lot and insurance premiums reflect that.

In the US, people without insurance can typically get discounted rates if they pay out of pocket and/or charitable care if they have trouble paying at all. To your point about supply and demand, insurance drives aggregate medical costs up because your total payment for medical care (which includes your health insurance coverage) has to cover overhead and payroll for doctors and insurers.

Most people, even often intelligent people*, approach economics with the mindset of a medieval peasant.

That is to say, they see it as a zero-sum, moralistic story. If the travelling merchant doesn't make anything but sells cloth for two ducats a yard while buying it for one ducat a yard, he's a greedy middle-man who doesn't do anything of value (although I'll still sell him my cloth because nobody else will buy it...).

I'm convinced this is the default way of thinking about things. Just as we hate the rich because he evolved as hunter-gatherers who had to share meat with our tribe-mates, we struggle to understand positive-sum interactions, prices as signals, and other essential economic concepts.

I'm not a fan of the general impulse of 'things I value should be on the national curriculum because then other people would think like I do', I don't care about forcing kids to do art, music, literature, foreign languages etc.

But economics should absolutely be taught to children. We can't trust leaving our elites alone to understand economics since they've burned that trust on things like open borders and abolishing the police, so normal voters should understand (or at least be able to repeat as a maxim) that building houses causes house prices to go down, or that nothing in economics can be explained by 'greed'.

*I once had a conversation with a very intelligent software engineer who argued that everyone should be limited to owning one house, so that greedy landlords couldn't buy them all up and stop everyone else sharing in the property market. How exactly he expected renting to work when owning a rental property in addition to a house you live in was illegal wasn't clear.

You put stuff in someone else's name and then rent it out anyways.

My programmer friend wasn't advocating for a law with the intention that everyone would break it. He genuinely thought that 'one house per person' was a good policy.

I think it's a good policy. Shelter is not like other goods - you can literally only use one house at a time, and you must have one house as a roof over your head. So you enforce no superfluous houses per person, and if you want to move, you sell your house and buy another house. Obviously you need a few other bits to make it work: hotels for people who need to be somewhere temporarily, sublets for people who can't afford a full house. But freeing up the majority of the supply and making the market much more fluid should do a lot of good work.

Or, you know, you can just build up. Demolish the houses and build skyscrapers. Just let people profit from owning real estate and they will trip over themselves to do it for you.

No need to ration the supply when you can just increase it.

It's funny, all the YIMBYs want this or claim to, but when there's complaints about the cost of housing, it's always a single-family detached home used as the benchmark for complaining.

It's not going to happen, and even if it were, unless massive changes were made they would just become assets in the same way. Britain's housing market is hugely dysfunctional because houses are assets first and shelter second: it's hugely sticky, people just point-blank refuse to sell if the market starts turning down and they have very little incentive to. The market is so sticky that prices almost can't change.

Britain's housing market is hugely dysfunctional because houses are assets first and shelter second

I thought it was because (1) by-right zoning doesn't exist, so instead literally every single attempt to build housing has to run the gauntlet of getting permission from the govt., and (2) urban growth boundaries stymie building near large cities.

So if supply - demand curves are generally accurate, you want to decrease price but limiting supply, and think price will come down?

decrease price but limiting supply (by???)

Eh? No? If you assume that most renters would prefer to own, which in my experience is true and is also the default assumption of the vast majority of discussion, then most people are paying rent when they would prefer to be paying mortgages but can't because landlords have driven up the price of housing to sell it back to people, often literally making you pay their mortgage in the process. The point is to increase the supply of buyable houses, driving down the price of the asset and moving them from 'financial asset and moneyspinner with that income priced in' back to 'shelter'.

The main problem is transferability of mortgages but buy-to-let pretty much has to be predicated on rent being greater than mortgage payments in any case so I think it must be possible to work something out.

I mean, you've essentially made full-property rentals illegal. So if you have a family and want to move city, but don't want to buy, tough. If you are young and starting out but want your own place, tough. And it doesn't make housing any cheaper or more abundant, it just makes it less convenient for everyone. There's a reason that even the most insane socialist hell-holes haven't pursued this policy, because it's the sloppiest of slopulism.

Your reply doesn't seem to deal in any way with the consequences of making housing abundant. The picture you are painting is just 'like now, but you aren't allowed to rent any more', and you don't seem to be engaging in any way with the massive systemic changes that would likely result in effectively 2Xing the amount of housing in the country and vastly increasing the buy/sell frequency of houses.

(Only 60% of housing in the UK is owner-occupier, and if we assume at least another 5% of that is second-homes, that's 2X the housing stock.)

EDIT: not 2x because obviously you have renters living in the houses already, I'm being thick.

It appears about 3% of houses in the UK are second homes (not rented out).

Ok, but what do people who can't afford a down payment but want to live in a house do? Someone has to own a house in order to rent it out.

Subletting seems ok. The idea is to prevent massing property empires, as e.g. the Swiss do by requiring that every building be partially occupied by a Swiss person. But if you zoom out I think this question becomes pretty similar to the question of what to do if you can't afford rent: you do something with your life so you can afford rent, like move, or you're homeless.

Obviously the paradigm assumes that if you free up the 40% of UK homes that are not currently owner-occupier then it produces a big, big drop in price. If not, you've failed and should put the previous paradigm back in.

I think something like this happened in late Republican Rome.

If the travelling merchant doesn't make anything but sells cloth for two ducats a yard while buying it for one ducat a yard, he's a greedy middle-man who doesn't do anything of value (although I'll still sell him my cloth because nobody else will buy it...).

No one else will buy it because the merchant has patent from the king to only serve this area.

Modern businesses excel at creating environments where they need not compete. Regulations, vertical integrations, captive customers, licensing, cartels, centralization, credentialism - businesses love them. They hate the free and efficient market with a passion. Anything that raises the barriers of entry - they approve.

One of the great paradoxes of political economy is that the free market is the creation of the State, and must be carefully stewarded by the State if it is to survive. In fact, after law and public order, it's probably the paramount criterion of good governance in the modern age. How free are your markets = how good is your State.

Most people, even often intelligent people*, approach economics with the mindset of a medieval peasant.

That is to say, they see it as a zero-sum, moralistic story. If the travelling merchant doesn't make anything but sells cloth for two ducats a yard while buying it for one ducat a yard, he's a greedy middle-man who doesn't do anything of value (although I'll still sell him my cloth because nobody else will buy it...).

I'm convinced this is the default way of thinking about things. Just as we hate the rich because he evolved as hunter-gatherers who had to share meat with our tribe-mates, we struggle to understand positive-sum interactions, prices as signals, and other essential economic concepts.

Agreed. Economics is as counterintuitive as quantum mechanics or general relativity. Except, of course, that most people have no reason to go around thinking about modern physics, but everyone must interact with the market.

Try explaining to people that wages are the price of work, and just as the price of meat must go up or down depending on whether there is shortage or a surplus of cattle, salaries should also go up or down depending on how the labor market is doing, and they will look at you like you are the villain of a fantasy novel. Hence, nominal rigidity, and the necessity of inflation.

I'm not a fan of the general impulse of 'things I value should be on the national curriculum because then other people would think like I do', I don't care about forcing kids to do art, music, literature, foreign languages etc.

But economics should absolutely be taught to children. We can't trust leaving our elites alone to understand economics since they've burned that trust on things like open borders and abolishing the police, so normal voters should understand (or at least be able to repeat as a maxim) that building houses causes house prices to go down, or that nothing in economics can be explained by 'greed'.

This would go about as well as forcing everyone to learn algebra does now. The course would be watered down until the average student could memorize enough answers to get a C without understanding the concepts, then immediately forget everything after graduation.

Maybe if you made it a general education requirement for college students, that would actually do something... although even they often fail to absorb the concepts.

Try explaining to people that wages are the price of work, and just as the price of meat must go up or down depending on whether there is shortage or a surplus of cattle, salaries should also go up or down depending on how the labor market is doing

Salaries that don't go down fall under Chesterton's fence, and you should make a better attempt to understand why people want them before deciding that we should get rid of them.

Actual human beings need to do long term planning, if only for things like "I'll know that if I keep this job I'll still be able to survive next year". Predictability is important, and salaries that don't go down are a lot more valuable than salaries that do, over and above the loss in money from the salary going down.

(Note that a common libertarian answer, "well, they can take insurance against their salary going down", doesn't work because the argument is that this desire should be eliminated from the market, not just satisfied in some way other than through salary. After all, an employer who won't lower salaries is already providing implicit insurance.)

And we do have salaries that go up and down. They are limited to either 1) low-end jobs where the effective salary varies because of tips, but the jobs are undesirable in general, such as odd working hours, bad conditions, and low pay; or 2) high end jobs where the salary doesn't matter, i.e. executives getting bonuses.

Also, notice that your reasoning leads to "it's irrational to rent an apartment for a year under a lease that has a constant monthly rent, rather than letting the landlord raise and lower the rent."

And we do have salaries that go up and down. They are limited to either 1) low-end jobs where the effective salary varies because of tips, but the jobs are undesirable in general, such as odd working hours, bad conditions, and low pay; or 2) high end jobs where the salary doesn't matter, i.e. executives getting bonuses.

Lots of midrange jobs have pay that effectively goes up or down. It takes many forms, the most common is a bonus, but also fixed period equity grants, incentives based on company performance, and taxable fringe benefits. Most big companies have a big chunk of comp in these areas over the base pay.

Equity grants work especially well because they automagically go down if the company is doing bad, but the company can always top them up. And if the company wants to cut pay even more than the drop in stonk price, they can decline refreshers.

If the government is doing its job, the salaries will go down anyway, in real terms if not in nominal terms. That's why a small amount of predictable inflation is considered good for an economy; because it lets wages adjust without ever having to go down in nominal terms; you just grow some of them slower than others!

At that point, whether the job will still let you survive next year or not depends on how much your salary went up (if at all) compared to the price of other things; it is very much not guaranteed. Which is exactly the same as if the nominal wages had been allowed to go up or down without inflation; the mechanism is just hidden as a concession to human nature.

The alternative is that salaries never go down in real terms, which is actually really bad when you think about it? Solve for the equilibrium.

People object to inflation like they do to salaries going down, for similar reasons.

They have a lot less power to stop inflation. (yeah, they can vote for the other guy. It generally doesn't work, and when it does they notice the prices are still high and punish the guy they voted in for that by bringing the previous bunch back).

The alternative is that salaries never go down in real terms, which is actually really bad when you think about it? Solve for the equilibrium.

I'm not sure to what equilibrium you are referring; can you elaborate?

The great-uncle comment by @The_Nybbler already covers some of the things companies would do to get around this; laying off higher-paid workers and hiring new workers at lower wages. Another likely consequence is that companies would be much less willing to give raises when times are good, because now raises are a much bigger commitment. And if a company is unwilling or unable to do these things, it might well go under because it simply is unprofitable at higher salaries.

Now, what happens to the newly unemployed workers? If they are willing to work at a lower wage, they can probably find new work soon enough, but now they have to eat the transaction cost of switching jobs; if they were willing to take lower wages in the first place, they could have just stayed with the same employer. Alternatively, if they are not willing to take lower wages, thinking themselves too good for them now that they have been employed at a higher wage, they end up in a sad imitation of Latrell Sprewell refusing a $7 million deal because "I have a family to feed", and the world has to do without their labor until they get desperate enough to change their minds.

This can all be avoided by simply letting real wages vary up and down, and the easiest way to do that is to inflate nominal wages less or more; that way, the number never goes down.

Wage stickiness is a complication, but salaries still do go up and down. Instead of individual salaries going down, expensive individuals get laid off and/or juniors are hired at lower rates than previously. Though the general "solution" to wage stickiness has been inflation, and that's been around long enough to pass the fence.

It is cartels all the way down. Whenever you look for explanations about abnormally high prices - just look for cartels. Any market where there are less than 5 sellers/buyers you have automatic cartel behavior even if not explicit.

The markets in the west have been trough so much mergers, acquisitions, agglomerations that usually in whatever chain of commerce you think of there is usually a choke point in which there are few players.

Governments have kinda maybe somewhat alleviated the problem when there is a single seller for something. But they have not even tried to solve what happens when there are 2-3 buyers only (or 2-3 sellers) that just don't feel to compete with each other. Or the case of a single buyer. For example the meat packers right now are fucking both the beef producers and consumers.

Airline, travel, communications, internet providers, car rental, healthcare, groceries - if it is not produced in China - you have a cartel or something similar. This is how private equity operates too - they buy all the small businesses in an area and just jack up the prices - because instead of 20 plumbers, you suddenly have 20 "independents" bought by 2-3 PE funds.

b. There are evil people colluding to drive up the prices of essential goods

This does sometimes happen, though. Grocery price-fixing occurs from time-to-time even though ostensibly it should be one of the more difficult sectors to do that in. More commonly it also occurs at the supplier level, especially now that there has been considerable market consolidation in key sectors.

I saw lots of people mocking those who thought something was afoot with the price of eggs in 2025: as if those evil companies were just conspiring to raise prices, instead of being it just the natural result of a supply crunch! What, do you think prices are just based on greed? Well...

I once had such an experience with a compassionate, highly intelligent friend of mine (mid 6 figures earner as an engineer, frequent donator to charity, would gladly give the shirt off his back to someone in need).

It started off with him posting some milquetoast meme in the groupchat supporting some ridiculous rent control policy, and me replying with another milquetoast meme referencing the economic problems with rent control. This kicked off an extremely long argument, debating the relative merits and demerits of rent control, which concluded with him admitting that the proposed policy would almost certainly raise housing prices in the long run.

At this point, as I see him continuing to type, I think I've convinced him to stop supporting the rent control policy; but instead he writes "even if you're right on a utilitarian level, I just can't morally support increasing the rent of people in need".

With this masterstroke, he's depicted himself as the empathetic deontologist chad and me as the cold-hearted utilitarian soyjak, and all I'm able to do is agree to disagree and slink away with my tail between my legs.

I think that fundamentally the vast majority of humans are wired to prefer policies and actions that have obvious, visible benefits, even if on aggregate, they're net negative in a way that's difficult to explain. It's really only EA's (extreme autists) that can bite the bullet and advocate for policy wonk solutions such as means-testing welfare or UAE-style guest worker visas, with aggregrate net-benefit but that look evil on the surface.

To be honest, I'm pretty blackpilled on the future of politics in the age of a low trust society permeated by internet and social media. It seems almost certain that politics are going to become Latinized, a pendulum between left wing socialist populism and right wing strongman populism.

But what is there to be done about it?

I think, having looked a little at the notion and having had people discuss it with me, that the grocery stores are symbolic and really don't mean anything more than "Mayor Mamdani making good on campaign promises!"

There are going to be one store in each of the five boroughs, with the 30% below market price cap on certain staple goods. That's not going to do much of anything. For a family wanting/needing to reduce price of grocery bill, the expense and time in getting to the one store in the borough may well cost as much or more than going to the local big chain supermarket or grocery store and buying what's on offer there.

I won't say it's posturing but it's in the service of his 'man of the people' image and once he's out of office, I fully expect these stores to shut down and no more to be said about "groceries for the people, of the people, by the people".

I won't say it's posturing but it's in the service of his 'man of the people' image and once he's out of office

It is posturing, but not to "the people."

It is posturing to the activist class, whose idea of poor is stuck in early 19th century, who imagine that the poor are starving and even 30% discount on bread and potatoes would alleviate their plight. Actual poor people never asked for this.

even 30% discount on bread and potatoes would alleviate their plight

The average DSA voter? Or rather, I guess I should say party member going by this (college educated, but in poorly-paid job). "At last! Now I can afford to eat for the week, all week!"

Based on this grid, what is the most Democratic voting group in America? It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year.

This is very much also the sweet spot for the DSA. In the group’s most recent member survey in 2021, 80 percent of members aged 25 or older had bachelor’s degrees, but 45 percent had household incomes below $60,000 per year.

This is unusual, because education and income are usually substantially positively correlated. In the composite CES data, only 19 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher had household incomes of $60K or below. The DSA rate is around twice that. These voters aren’t necessarily “blue collar” in the sense of working with their hands. But that doesn’t mean they’re privileged. Common occupations among DSA members include teachers, non-profit workers, social workers, and public sector employees.

I shouldn't laugh. Lots of people relying on food banks and help from charitable organisations. Just that the Mamdani Marts (as I've seen a reference calling them) are not the solution.

even Mottizens veer into this, seeing working in finance as parasitising upon society rather than allocating where goods and services ought to go

Sometimes it is parasitising, though. Last month, the Massachusetts AG settled with Beacon Mobility, a private equity school bus roll-up, for $2.4M over colluding with a competitor to carve up special ed busing contracts in three towns. Beacon then bid as the sole bidder and signed a certificate of non-collusion anyway. After the rival floated a big rate hike, a Beacon employee wrote "Like us, they need to get their rates up as well and now all the business managers are freaking out." The PE owner (Audax, 1,500+ add-on acquisitions firm-wide) bought dozens of local bus companies and kept the old names on the buses, so districts soliciting bids often don't notice "competitors" share an owner. The state inspector general found 67% of districts got one or zero bids last cycle, and renewals came in 35-51% higher, way past cost inflation.

It's not only Massachusetts, Beacon now own many as 30 transport companies across 25 states.

Do colluding transportation companies or PE working to extract tax-dollars from schools count as a cabal or is this an emergent phenomena?

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