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RE: Towards Mediocrity: Do Not Tell Me What "The Average Person" Needs!
We live in a culture to buy cheap and replace it as soon as it stops to function!
We live in a culture to buy cheap and replace it as soon as it stops to function!
Yes, but why?
Capitalist is the answer. ;)
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And what do you mean by "capitalist"?
And by "capitalism," you mean what, exactly? Free markets, or an interventionist political system riddled with corporate cronyism? The two concepts are in opposition, yet both are called "capitalism."
Also, your definition of "capitalist" is wrong in either instance.
You play with semantic and I believe you already know the answer.
You say a "capitalist" is someone who acts in accordance with the principles of "capitalism," and yet you accuse me of playing with semantics when I ask for clarification of what you mean. On the one hand, "capitalism" refers to political plunder. On the other, it refers to productive voluntary exchange. These concepts are in opposition. The former redistributes wealth to cronies of the political establishment. The latter creates wealth. All economic systems involve capital. The question is who controls it: the individual, or the State.
Many factors are involved in the economic status quo. Taxes at every stage of production increase costs artificially, meaning quality must be reduced to achieve a given consumer price. Price controls and trade restrictions on materials an labor also adversely affect costs. Subsidies, bailouts, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels, nationalized industries, etc. prevent competition that would otherwise inform consumer choice and potentially encourage improvements. And those are just the obvious factors. The federal reserve market manipulations have resulted in increased costs for housing and diverted wealth into unsustainable investments, reducing the real wealth available to consumers, and often pinching their market choices from the demand side just as much as the corporate collusion cuts their choices in supply as well.
It should be obvious that these are all antithetical to laissez-faire free market capitalism. Corporations are political creations using political force to avoid such capitalism, yet their bigwigs are called "capitalists," too. Hopefully this clarifies why I am trying to get you to define terms that may not be as concrete as you think. Careless conflation doesn't help us study the real causes and effects in economic problems.
Why waste your time to argue on something that is easy to understand. You are someone educated and you already know the answer so I will not go further on this conversion.