How do you prevent that without throwing away all semblance of free markets?
I also would rather not see CEOs making such massive paychecks, but if that's what the market is willing to pay them I don't see a clear way to stop it.
I also would rather not see CEOs making such massive paychecks, but if that's what the market is willing to pay them I don't see a clear way to stop it.
Totally agree there. To me that's a problem, but I know for many they see that as a good thing.
> When all grocery stores jack up prices, what choice do people have?
A rather surprising fact about food, it doesn't just come from grocery stores. Farmers markets, gardening, hunting, raising chickens, etc are absolutely options.
Almost all of human history was devoid of grocery stores entirely. Local markets are a different story, but then you are often dealing with people from your community and not massive corporations that don't know who you are and only care about profit.
You’ve never seriously tried those things.
Farmers market prices? Get out.
Gardening? The time investment to keep a garden large enough to make a significant dent in one’s grocery bill is prohibitive.
Have fun having your life revolve around raising livestock.
Hunting, maybe if you live near public game lands, have the tools and desire to butcher your own meat.
In all cases the economies of scale in industrial farming trumps local operations.
I also have a pretty large garden, we don't spend all that much time on it. We don't plant as intensively as most people think about. We don't till and keep the dirt bare, its more of a food forest at this point but we do still plant annual produce in rows in some areas. We spend maybe 3 hours per week total in the garden during the summer.
Raising livestock doesn't mean your life has to revolve around them, its all up to how you choose to raise them and what you raise.
> In all cases the economies of scale in industrial farming trumps local operations.
Have you ever been to an industrial farm, feed lot, chicken house, or slaughterhouse? If not I'd hold judgement on the value of that scale until you see how the animals are actually raised and treated. I'd extend that to crop fields as well, though its harder to empathize with what a plant when they're so different from us.
I very much agree with how you describe our system. Though I would see that as the fundamental problem to fix, something like grocery stores acting like greedy corporations is a tiny, distracting problem when its part of a system that has hints of slavery.
There is no position that you can't fill for 10M. You can find people to run entire nations as well as brain surgeons and rocket scientists for less.
You could take every dollar from the most obscenely rich in the US and you could only afford to find the US government for 6 months. We simply spend too much to fix it by taxing the rich to death.
Which, among other things, means returning to aggressive antitrust enforcement that we haven’t seen in decades.