Hacker News Reader

Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

> We vote for the one we prefer every time we buy something.

This is actually not true. As a consumer my choices are constrained by retailers and suppliers (and government due to regulations). They choose based on price what to offer. If all retailers in my area don't want to supply organic food, I can't buy it.

So I have limited power to alter the market. For extremely bad options, there's the choice not to buy, but for necessities, that option is precluded.

Which is why a healthcare "free market" (hint: it's anything but free right now) is a chimera: when you or your family is dying or suffering, you are willing to pay "value based pricing".

The real solution is to delink the "global" supply chain and build up local options. Resilience also increases jobs and tax base, but reduces megacorp profits. Since we actually live in an oligarchy, profits are all that are chased.

View on HN

Your vote has limited power to alter the market because it's just one vote. America chose Wal-Mart over Main Street. It's tragic, but that's what American consumers chose.

Amusing how the point is missed again. I wouldn't blame consumers for consolidation on the supplier side through unethical practices.

Or perhaps unrestrained capitalism will always result in these conditions?

I don't know if you recall the 90s, when WalMart was on a rampage, but there was considerable local resistance all over the place from groups who understood the hazards. The opportunity to be informed was there.

I also remember how bad those small town merchants they drove out were. And in the 90s they are still 'we buy American so you don't have to'. I'll take todays Walmart over what small towns had before, though they have gone downhill.

I remember periods when I made it a point to avoid Starbucks and get my coffee drinks at a small cart near work which appeared to be family-owned. They were nice, but the product was so inconsistent in quality -- and in general -- that I finally understood that part of it.

But the rest of the reality is that you need to consider the relationship. Buying from a local-owned store doesn't really count if you're just doing a transaction and walking away. I didn't feel like discussing the drink quality, or asking for a refund, would have been appreciated, so I stopped going there. Local stores that you can't develop a relationship with might as well be megachains. Local stores that you don't WANT to develop a relationship with, making yourself a little vulnerable in the process, are another matter. America didn't just want cheap and/or consistent goods, they didn't want to have to interact with the people they were buying them from. And that's the real sad part.

There should be a name for the fallacy of expecting people to "vote" with their dollars on every single issue all of the time.

It's like the opposite mistake that communists make. They expect a single centralized decision maker to balance all considerations to set a price, which is inevitably ineffective.

This vote with your dollar argument expects every individual to balance all considerations to set their own personal price. There is an assumption of information symmetry and unlimited ability to analyze on the part of the individuals behind the vote with your feet argument that is just not remotely true.

I run into this conflict. Many like to regard themselves as sovereign agents who can make informed decisions for themselves. This is the ideal, and I can argue on behalf of it.

Of course, reality doesn't check out that way and the record shows it. This doesn't stop people from getting upset should you imply that they are not equipped to sensibly make their own decisions.

We are strongly encouraged to make terrible decisions all the time, and there's a lot of money behind it, from many actors.

I don’t follow your logic here. Every paragraph has questionable claims, but the last one is most glaring to me.

You are hand-waving that delinking from global supply chains somehow magically fixes the issue (I don’t see how it’s relevant to the Southwest article) and that it only reduces megacorp profits.

Local doesn’t mean resilient. Local options must have their entire supply chain local in order to be maximally resilient. But now you are talking about removing a fundamental feature of capitalism: comparative advantage.

It is 100x more expensive to run a labor-based factory on the San Francisco peninsula than it is in the cheaper parts of East Asia. Cost of living, local talent, building and labor codes, etc all vary and contribute to costs. When a widget is made in SFBA for 50x the cost of the same widget with comparable quality elsewhere in the world, the risk of those one-in-a-century events means that the consumer is paying 10x more for most of their costs for the 99/100 years they don’t need the risk mitigation.

Also, your plan to delink cuts across the de facto way things work, so now you have to invent a way to convince Americans to pay 10x more for some obscure risk issue they will have forgotten about in 4 years. Are you adding massive import taxes/tariffs, outlawing imports, or do you just expect voluntary compliance?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com