> But for decades, the American market has not been free.
The grand, boneheaded naivete to fail to understand that middlemen are an emergent and intrinsic property of free markets in practice.
The grand, boneheaded naivete to fail to understand that middlemen are an emergent and intrinsic property of free markets in practice.
Though Ronald Reagan dared asked what nobody else thought to ask, "what if monopolies ... good?", so now we're back with a new set of Morgans and Vanderbilts.
The billionaires of today are just pure rent extraction schemes on things that already exist, make money by enshittification of what is already there. Nothing of value ever needs to be created. They use the govt to help them, after all why create anything new at all, when you can just take it?
Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money for reservations separately, but that introduces all sorts of extra new inefficiencies that weren't there before. Like, now that reservations can be bought and sold, it's now legal, possibly moral, and most notably, profitable to hoard them. And since reservations are a derivative on the underlying capacity of a restaurant, you're going to have tables that are "reserved" but unused because the "owner" of that reservation happened to sell it on to a third-party vendor that's now trying to hike the price to last-minute diners.
Meanwhile, the actual restaurant trying to sell food, can't sell food in their own restaurant, because their salesfloor is full of empty tables that are worth more to the market dead than alive. They are undergoing demand destruction as they are involuntarily transformed from a food vendor into a landlord of tiny plots of real estate whose desirability has long since been detached from any surrounding circumstances.
The argument for markets is that unregulated commerce is very good at calculation. Or, more specifically, that price discovery is the process of putting bounties on better information than is currently available. The flipside of this is that everything around the market needs to be regulated or you're calculating garbage into garbage.
And you made me think of this current market trend where we can effectively beg for tips and donations from a small, roofed, and electrified domicile and you might even become famous, but if you do it out on the street, it's frowned upon and people are less willing to give.
If someone is willing to pay for a reservation and a restaurant willing to take payment, then it’s a free market. It’s not inefficient at all.
You may not like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not free
And now, you want to actually go to Restaurant A and eat a curry, but they look at you like you've grown an extra head. Eat Food? What, here? In Restaurant A?
Congratulations, you've just invented banking, where people look at you similarly if you attempt to actually go and collect the gold that your bank says represents the money that's actually stored as a series of north and south magnetic domains on a thin sheet of rust painted onto a rapidly-spinning aluminium disk.
Meanwhile I ring the guy at the restaurant started by his grandmother when she fled Pakistan at the end of the Second World War, about ten minutes before we show up, and when I get there I've got a pint of Guinness, a menu, and some chapatis and chutney already on the table.
I prefer it that way. The food's better, for a start.
I don't need the menu, the guy's just going to bring me the desi shit from the family meal.
If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it. If it indeed benefits a few individuals massively while on net reducing utility to society, an argument can be made that society has a moral imperative to ban it. Hence the limitations on gambling, on alcohol and tobacco marketing/sales, etc.
Of course not.
> If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it
Then it’s not a free market.
To be perfectly clear, bots don't eat food, and we don't need a market to tell us otherwise. Even an individual having Google Duplex reserve ten tables in advance isn't going to be able to eat ten dinners. But if reservations actually cost money, then any restaurant doing the smart thing of just skipping no-shows to keep the kitchen running is now defrauding reservation holders. Capacity has to be reserved and left fallow for the sake of optionality.
Bringing this back to market terms: if reservations are so in demand that restaurants have to charge for them, why don't they just raise the prices on the actual food instead?
The ideal state of the ecosystem is not the ideal state of any organism within it.