Just an inherent consequence of capitalism. If people are willing to pay much more than the price that was set by the manufacturer, it’s their loss and a business opportunity for third parties.
That’s Capitalism, buddy. I’m advocating for Worker Ownership of their own labor, and collective ownership of the Means of Production. Personal Property is fine, but the end goal of Capitalism is everyone renting everything from a few Capitalists.
They tried it and people just sold their shares immediately to some guy buying them all and bought vodka and cigs
All I want nowadays is just equal opportunities to everyone to amass capital which probably would abolish inheritance first and then regulate market to protect from monopolies.
It’s a race and war but at least make the rules fair. Then those who win they win and lose they lose but it was a fair fight
On a more serious note, Communism is a future ideal, money would still exist until its possible to abolish. There are tons of writings on this that can help elaborate, why do you believe work must be done with monetary inventive?
Edit: oh yea, you’re the landlord everyone called out a while ago, and rather than making any points to defend yourself you just pretended you were superior. Lmao
You like the feeling of order, so you work. Seems like a non-monetary motivation for me.
You also think worker ownership of the Means of Production is Capitalism if it has profit, so I think you’d do better by actually researching what you talk about first.
No, my motivatiopn is me thinking of myself. I would never in a million years go work in a mine if i didnt get compensated for it monetarily. I do more risky and hard work than a teacher so i should also be rewarded more than a teacher.
But either way, even if you’re fully self-interested, you still work for non-monetary reasons.
Again, please address why you think Socialism is actually Capitalism, we can’t even begin to discuss a future system like Communism if you can’t even understand Socialism.
Right here: “I was specifically asking for communes and you show me coops that still have capitalist gain in mind. Delusional”
Worker co-operatives are Socialist structures, what separates Capitalism from Socialism is the distribution of ownership of the Means of Production.
Again, we cannot even hope to discuss a post-Socialist system like Communism without first understanding Socialism, and we can’t discuss Socialism without understanding Capitalism. You don’t even understand Capitalism if you equate it to profit.
Equal, collective ownership via workers is Socialist. You’re pulling the superiority card because it’s your way of avoiding actually having to logically comprehend Socialism, which is why anything you say can be tossed in the trash regarding leftism, or even Capitalism.
[…] which is why anything you say can be tossed in the trash […]
You have no intention of discussing. Your intention is narcisistic belittlement of people you deem to be “the enemy”.
I concede. You are the smarter person. You are grand.
There are systems with private property and property rights, this anything other than capitalism = the most extreme version of communism shit is getting real old and people should be shamed for persisting it’s hyper-bullshittery.
So either all are wrong or all are right. Which is it? Cuz I know people who complain about house flippers, but are totally willing to scalp products like these.
No, all is just as bad. Scalpers are preventing people from getting things that they want unless they pay a premium. They’re not contributing anything to society at all.
Buying up enough of something so that you’re one of the only names in town is a “smart business move”, because then you can start to charge whatever prices you want. Totally not scalping. You see it in private healthcare, food, newsmedia, streaming, telecom.
Not just buying it up, of course, but making the market openly hostile to any kind of competition.
Maybe that’s through state regulation. Maybe that’s through some smear campaign. Maybe that’s through leveraged buyouts or vertical integration or just doing a little industrial espionage to fuck over the business next door.
Just ask Aaron Swartz what happens to guys who try to foster open-sourced alternatives to cartels and monopoly concerns.
I mean this sincerely and not as a hollow insult: you’re too cynical. Give the internet a rest for a while and get some endorphins flowing. You’d like it…and we’d appreciate it.
There are cycles of supply and demand in housing. This is as obvious as looking at graphs of house prices. So this meme is utter nonsense as is the conceit that somebody buying a house to sell it later is somehow evil or a “scalper”. Boo fucking hoo basically.
You could find out when there wasn’t housing demand simply by looking house prices in an area over time. If it flattens or falls in an area, then demand has fallen. And instead of sobbing that people richer than you can afford to buy a particular house at the market rate, you should instead be lobbying state & city governments to change the absurd building codes that prevent more affordable urban housing to be built that the suburban sprawl that afflicts most US cities.
I’m not so sure. It’s just one home that’s been posted. Then again, the nuance of predatory property ‘investing’ isn’t easy to represent in one picture.
In any case, I don’t get the feeling that the meme is saying that they’re as bad as each other, it’s making excuses for scalper exploiting consumers.
Same. I’ve lived in all the basic types of housing: apartment, duplex, house, etc… If I liked being woken up at 3am by some drunk asshole stomping around in the apartment above me or some kid storming in because they don’t understand addresses yet, then I would be doing that already. Maybe other people enjoy that sort of thing? You can have your congested living conditions, but leave me and my single-family zone out of it
Zoning is irrelevant. Perfect zoning laws could mean 10x the houses - and the investors will buy them all up and supercharge property prices all over again.
Seriously though, zoning laws are a big reason why we have the current housing crisis. If given the opportunity, someone or some business will build high density housing. But you can’t with he current implementation of zoning laws. Without that barrier, you would see a lot more high density building projects
Still we do need zoning laws. I don’t think anyone wants a factory or a garbage dump in their back yard. Used correctly zoning also helps limit sprawl.
I think there’s a blind spot on the left for this one. Opening up zoning for higher density is effectively a giveaway to local developers, who are invariably shitbags. It’d be preferable if solutions like banning corporations from owning housing could be enacted.
That’s based on the theory that there are enough houses and flippers and hedge funds are just sitting on them in order to rake it in later as property values are driven up. If that were true, we’d expect to see large vacancy rates in cities. Problem is, we don’t. My city has <4% vacancy for rentals and <1% for home ownership. This seems to be similar to the numbers in many other major cities in North America. If we got rid of every corporation that was sitting on a house unused, the available housing would go up by 4% or so, at most.
We need more housing stock. As it stands, the only way to do that is a giveaway to shitbag developers. They’re the ones that hold the capitol for building more housing.
This could be mitigated by city councils also encouraging/mandating those developers to have unionized staff.
If you can’t answer that question, then you can’t decide on the correct course of action.
Vacancy rates in cities suggest the answer is that the empty homes are someplace else. The correct course of action, therefore, is building more in cities.
If that were true, we also wouldn’t see a low vacancy rate. It does happen, but not at a high enough level to substantially effect prices. I’d still totally support a law limiting how corporations can buy and flip homes. There’s just not much evidence that it’s widespread.
I know this is quite a bit later, but this comment confused me. I do not see how loosening zoning laws that limit density and banning corporations from owning houses are mutually exclusive.These policies can and should work together as part of a bigger urbanist policy. I also don’t see how supporting local developers is that bad of a thing. I’d rather have the money stay in the community and go to a community member than some multinational corporation who owns thousands of homes across the country. Still it isn’t the best. Cooperative housing or need based housing who is better, but realistically those can’t fill up the excess of stock that we need. We will need input from private developers, as well as a big government housing initiative.
Yeah, I’m absolutely not saying deregulation is a good idea, just like goat-law. I can see how my comment read though, rewrote a bit to make the cynical undertone a bit more obvious.
I was only pointing out that the current, specific set of laws, is keeping this problem a reality. That it’s not a particularly natural situation to be in.
No. Every American should be able to have 40 acres and a mule.
What do you mean, that’s more than 5x the total acreage of the US? This is a minor problem, we’ll just make more land or steal some more from the Indians.
How would you know, North America is literally missing the opportunity to have new development of things other than single family houses or apartment big buildings, bet you there would be a lot of demand for midrises, row houses, mixed neighborhoods in general
Row houses maybe, but there’s an adversity to condo fees which usually come along with every other source of housing. A lot of people want to feel like they own their home outright, so that once their mortgage is done being paid off, all they need to worry about is the hydro, water, and property taxes. There’s a lot of stories about condo groups doubling condo fees that put others off those types of places.
I feel like every single family home has HOA dues, these days, so that comparison is kinda moot. Whether it’s condo fees, HOA dues, or the local cartel extorting you for protection, you’re gonna get nickel and dimed.
Developers in my city are building apartments like mad and filling every single one of them. The common council finally opened up zoning for row housing in the past year.
I flip items all the time, but they are items that very few people want, so I’m providing a service to the few people who need the things that I sell. If anybody needs any vintage vacuum tubes, I have several hundred. I have a Pentium III laptop. Good luck finding these things out in the wild if you’re looking for them.
Some need an actual old hardware for research, for improving emulators, for testing compatibility, for porting specific software. I would guess it may have more uses, but those are ones I know of. And for display in a museum, too
NASA needed 8086 chips till they retired the shuttle. They were paying good $$$ for the things as well. Dunno if anyone would need those things anymore at this point.
No one is buying new homes and then turning around and selling them. They would lose their ass. They don’t have a fixed price. Builders are selling each and every one for every dollar they can. Investors are typically buying distressed properties that the seller can’t sell and the buyer can’t buy in it’s current state, repairing it and only then reselling it. If they didn’t those sellers would just be stuck in those broken down homes forever.
There are some that do this, but having recently gone through home buying, a lot of them cover up problems with cheap finishes or don’t fix things correctly, then charge a premium
The home investor pays pretty harsh taxes for flipping a house less than a year. Unless the scalper actually puts their own money into it to improve the home, the taxes alone would make the investment bad.
Basically there is usually some sort of value add an investor does to maximize profits.
I’m actually a huge fan of scalping and hope it happens more. Here’s why: many of your more dim-witted, more or less middle-class “free market” bros will gladly tell you that the value of a good is set by supply and demand. Hospital care is so expensive because there are comparatively few doctors, MRI machines, etc. in comparison with the entire population. Houses are so expensive because everyone wants a house and it’s an appreciable asset. I’ve seen these people my entire life. They’ll decry socialism and make the age old joke that “socialism is when no potato.” But the second a PS5 gets a street price of 700 bucks, suddenly they become walking “Homer Simpson fading into the hedge and coming back out wearing a different outfit” memes. They’ll say things like “scalping should be illegal” or “the government should step in to make sure that the actual consumers who want one can get one - nobody should be allowed to buy 500 of them and just sit on them forever.” Suddenly, market economics produces a state of inequality that doesn’t directly benefit them, and the guiding hand of the government should be used to ensure equitable distribution of resources. Not that they’d ever reflect on this in any way or consider how their personal experiences indicates a larger set of structural problems with the economic systems that produce such a state of affairs.
It’s free market exploitation. If you believe a free market can exist without regulations, you’re imbecile.
Just imagine: People need fridges. All fridge manufacturers agree to raise prices of a fridge by 2000%. So what, people are going to stop buying fridges? No - because they need them.
You would say: it’s a free market, some new manufacturer is going to offer fridges at regular prices. Well - no you dumb fuck. What’s the incentive for the new fridge manufacturer to sell at lower prices, when people are going to buy fridges anyway, because they need them? The answer is - none. It would be a dumb business decision, because your supply is limited, and you’re going to sell it at market price, because that item is essential.
So how does the economy even work if that’s possible? That’s right idiot - because it’s price fixing and it’s fucking illegal.
The incentive here would be that a new company could sell far more fridges when reasonably prices compared to their competitors and take all of their market share
But yes of course govt regulation is required when there is actual price fixing going on. I’d also like to know the alternative way of pricing goods/services from people with the alternate view
Your goal as a company is not to sell as many, but to make the greatest profit. So let’s say that the new market price is $3 000.
You’re the new company. Your supply is 20 000.
Do you
a) Sell fridges @ $2 950/each, undercutting competition while selling whole supply, because of demand being higher than your supply, making $59 000 000?
or
b) Sell fridges at a reasonable price of $400, selling the same amount, because your supply is limited anyway, making $8 000 000?
The company still has no incentive to go B route. They only need to undercut the competition, not make prices reasonable.
Free market self regulates, provided nothing artificially screws with supply and demand and there are competitors. Both scalping and price fixing screws with it. It is literally the cancer of free market, and people screwing with it call themselves “investors”, while actually destroying the economy.
It is the government’s responsibility to prevent those situations before they happen, otherwise these changes may be irreversible.
Btw. A situation like this was happening recently in the GPU market. Nvidia had a crazy high demand for their GPUs because companies invested in AI were going to buy these cards no matter the price. So they bumped the prices like crazy, and they were instantly sold out.
Meanwhile Nvidia’s competitor - AMD - didn’t have nearly as strong GPUs for Ai as Nvidia. Do you think AMD’s prices stayed the same? Nope. They bumped it just like Nvidia, barely undercutting them, because there was still demand, in fact growing demand, for GPUs for gaming, while AMD’s supply was obviously limited.
2 years later, lower demand, GPUs actually in stock, but prices are still fucked (though not as much) because people got used to it.
I don’t think you ever took even economics 101 in school because for almost all products there exists a price where you can actually increase your profits by decreasing the price because the larger sales volume offsets the revenue lost. Applies to your fridge example as well. You just assumed the same sales in both scenarios which is not even close to being realistic. And your Nvidia/AMD example ignores the high inflation seen during that period.
They are making the assumption that demand is constant because the product is a necessity (such as with something like insulin). Profit at higher volume and lower prices only happens with products with elastic demand.
In this example this new company would probably sell fridges at a whooping discount of some 5% and still be able to sell more although the price is 1990% of the original
The point being that if company A cuts their price to compete, and company B has an artificially inflated price
Now we have company B with no sales, and are forced to match or beat their competitor
Repeat until the price is fair. This breaks if both companies are co-ordinating with each other and forcing all other competition in line. But that’s a crime and would be regulated
I agree with the sentiment but feel like it doesn’t really work that way. It’s what I learnt from 2020 at least, whenever things turn to worse, people would rather do nothing than change anything. That makes a bit afraid of how bad should something get for changes to occur
This is an important observation. You’re probably more right, that things can get worse without people caring. Sometimes when we say things will get worse unless we do something, that does prevent a bill from passing or someone awful getting elected or some business going bankrupt etc.
I’d rather have retailers and manufacturers agree on a way to start prices high, then bring the price down towards the target MSRP every time the item is back in stock. That prevents scalping, let’s consumers decide exactly how much “get it early” tax they’re willing to pay, and gives the money to the people that did 99% of the work.
The simple reality is that if there are more people interested in a good at the current price than there are goods available, you must select a way to figure out who gets those scarce items. Raising prices and lotteries where you verify everyone participating is a distinct human are probably the most fair options.
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