> No one is forcing you to buy things at Walmart
When Walmart comes into a small town and uses it’s economies of scale to force smaller stores to shut down because they have the ability to operate at a loss, is this choice?
Walmart has a board of executives that decide on the direction of the company, it’s a corporation the performs central planning in order to maximize profits.
You seem to have figured out though that markets don't work without competition. Luckily the grocery market, at least in most places, is robustly competitive. And the government should step in when that is not the case.
If the labor market is a monopsony, as it commonly is in small towns, the government should step in.
They do not. Cuba has yet to experience a famine despite being under a severe embargo for several decades.
Famines also happen under capitalism. There are multitude of famines in east Africa to choose from, death count is well over tens of millions. Outside of Africa, the Bengal famine happened under British rule, death count 1-4 million people. While socialism was gaining traction inside British isles at the time, their colonies kept being ruled by harsh free market advocates.
However blaming capitalism for the Bengal famine is unfair, where imperialism, colonialism, and racism is a much better explanation, similarly, blaming communism for the Great Chinese Famine in Mao’s China is unfair, when fascism is a much better explanation.
Famines aren’t the only man-made disaster out there. It is hard to blame anything but global capitalism for disaster such as the Bhopal disaster, where one of the largest cities in India was poisoned in a effort to maximize profits for shareholders. Thousands died.
Together the disaster of capitalism cause several orders more deadly than the disaster commonly attributed to communism.
Capitalism did not cause people to be greedy, they were already greedy. Capitalism just embraces our nature and aligns incentives while communism pretends people can be changed to not follow incentives.
Because the US has embargoed Cuba for decades to cause hunger and desperation:
> If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. - https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06...
Citation needed on all your other claims.
https://www.eeas.europa.eu/cuba/european-union-and-cuba_en?s....
Also the embargo de jure excludes food and medicine (although de facto it is hard to export those to Cuba), but also subsidiaries of USA companies are also not allowed to trade with Cuba, so Canadian and EU companies which do business in the USA (which is almost everybody) are risking a lot by trading with Cuba, so in effect the embargo is somewhat extended by large parts of EU and Canada.
> Cuba has yet to experience a famine despite being under a severe embargo for several decades.
I honestly don’t know where you’ve heard this. I searched the news for a famine in Cuba, and nothing came up, not even unreliable sources. Where did you hear this?
Not to nitpick, but was Mao's China fascist, strictly speaking? I ask because the big 3 fascist regimes of the 20th century (Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Franco's Spain) were all stridently anti-communist, anti-collectivist, and anti-Marxist. You can see a lot of the other elements of many definitions of fascism in Mao's regime, but that anti-communist part is really hard to square. One definition I appreciated is that fascism is vocally and stridently anti-equality, and by that standard, Mao's regime is clearly not a fascist one, even as it just as strongly authoritarian as any self-described fascist regime.
I'm actually not prepared to say that communism or capitalism is more deadly, because I think the reality is that the people making decisions got to that place because of skill in political infighting, not superior judgement on the topic at hand.
That is, the reason planned economies do fail is not because planned economies must fail, per se. Rather economies are, of necessity, massively complicated things and its very difficult to account for every variable adequately whilst planning, to say nothing of the difficulty of conniving the appropriate carrots and sticks for every participant at every level, to convince all participants to follow the plan.
95% of what most Americans criticize as "the evils of communism" are, in fact, the evils of authoritarian systems; it just happens that the big authoritarian system that was in opposition to America for decades called itself communist. Much like North Korea calls itself "democratic".
And while fascism is, indeed, anti-equality, the inequality it seeks to foster is almost always between a cultural in-group and Everyone Else. Furthermore, fascism does not always seek to murder the Other; it also seeks to forcibly assimilate them.
Guess what Mao did in China: systematically eradicated massive swathes of Chinese culture—or rather, cultures, because there were many differences between what it meant to be, say, Han Chinese vs Mongolian or Tibetan. The Uyghur genocide that is ongoing today is just an extension of that—and yes, it fits quite well with fascist ideals.
Sure! I live in a small rural town with a poor public education system and no professional opportunities outside of manual labor. I had to leave high school to work to support my family. The most I can make is minimum wage, which means that I cannot afford basic necessities. What "better" jobs am I able to choose from? Or do I have to wait for "the government" to step in so my family doesn't starve?
Allowing poverty to exist really has nothing to do with capitalism the economic system and everything to do with the political climate in society. Capitalism is just free markets and property rights, it doesn't say anything about government redistribution. Getting rid of markets would not help poor people at all.
I would agree with most of what you've written if the price of goods at Walmart actually represented their true cost. But instead, Walmart relies on externalities (the most obvious one is their reliance on their staff being able to collect various forms of public assistance, but there are plenty more) in order to maintain their prices.
Unsurprisingly for an alumni of the Chicago school the author believes this is still an open question, however this article is kind of well written and everything up to the conclusion—that is the historical breakdown of this question—seems to indicate that socialism is good actually, and Laissez-faire capitalism is bad.
Ones that are in a different city, of course.
Acting like being in small town America is an economic tragedy is a gigantic insult to the millions of people who sacrificed everything to migrate to the developed world, and those people are largely extremely good at lifting themselves out of poverty when they arrive. Why are locals less economically mobile?
There has never been a more prosperous time to be alive than right now in western countries, we need to continue to work to make life better for everyone society, but there is no magic solution other than hard work.
There are many tings in here that should be addressed, including simple respect for other people, and recognition of varying economic status, and the reality of impoverishment.
However I want to address the migration question. As an immigrant my self I take offense that you suggest that people migrate to “the developed world” (ugh!) in search of prosperity. This is a great simplification, and kind of a regurgitation of a popular belief which isn’t true. Most people—including my self—migrate because of family, second is jobs and education, these are people that already have a job or have been admitted to school and come on a special worker or school visas. Majority of immigrants don’t sacrifice everything, just proximity to family and friends, and most use their existing wealth to make the migration as easy as possible. In fact demonstrating financial viability is a precondition for permanent residency, meaning by far majority immigrants who can’t afford to migrate, or don’t have a job or a scholarship awaiting them, are forbidden by law from staying.
Immigrants who sacrifice everything off course exists, and refugees in particular take great risks while migrating, but they are a minority, and there is not exactly prosperity awaiting them, rather, a hope for a safer place to live. Many refugees have decades of poverty awaiting them in their host country, the more social services they get, the easier it is for them to actually escape poverty.
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigra...
But than again, listen to what you are saying. Do you honestly want to live in a society where people are asked to “sacrificed everything” just because they happened to be born and raised a poor part of the country? Would you honestly prefer people struggle all of their childhood and most of their lives as young adults, only to than be forced to abandon their entire family, just to have maybe a shot at a better life? It may just be me, but I honestly would prefer there to be regulations and social services in place such that these lives are made easier.
The top employers that have SNAP beneficiaries also include the USPS, Amazon, Home Depot, Publix, Uber, McDonalds, Krogers...
How can a central planner effectively determine prices across an entire economy? Price fixing has historically been disastrous, from Diocletian to the USSR. This is literally the definition of the calculation problem.
Contrast this to politicians and bureaucrats who may have additional political incentives towards kickbacks, corruption or other, non-market inefficient practices.