I remain skeptical that all of Trump’s political positions fit his personal beliefs.
By contrast, the kind of people who are violently intolerant like this:
don’t forget themselves and talk about kissing the group they’re intolerant of (in this case black people but I imagine they’re probably homophobic too).
It seems likely the violent people from the video were white, Christian, right-wing males.
I don’t think Trump, who slipped up and talked about kissing men, is personally like the violent racists that second video is about (nor do I think he’s very Christian). But that won’t stop him from implementing racist, homophobic, Christian political policies. Trump seems to want to be in charge but not care what policies he implements as long as he’s getting a bunch of fame and attention. He seems to lack political principles and just be pandering to his voters and donors, including maybe silicon valley venture capitalists too btw:
Price collusion is happening via many companies all using the same app. You share your sales data with the app, and the other companies do too, and then it makes pricing recommendations to everyone based on everyone’s data. This lets companies all raise their prices at the same time without directly communicating with each other. That’s not a competitive free market.
My initial thought was that in a laissez-fair economy it should be ok for private companies to communicate with other private companies and set their prices - if they want to do that.
I have tried to think about why that shouldn’t be the case in a laissez-fair economy, but I have not figured out any good reason.
Roughly, I figure that a company is someones private property, and as long as it does not commit fraud (which I do not think setting prices is), and does not use physical force (which I do not think they are doing by setting prices) it is the owners’ choice.
Don’t you desire a market where competition between companies drives low prices, high quality and innovation? Where products and services are efficient because each businessman follows the profit motive to try to better serve the consumers than his competitors do? I thought that’s the kind of thing you want and find inspirational or aspirational.
I do. But on what ground could you prohibit companies to talk to each other and agree to voluntarily set their prices while respecting private property and freedom of association? Should they not be allowed to do what they think is best for them (without committing fraud and/or using or threatening physical force)?
I said nothing about prohibiting anything. That is a straw man.
Do you think the situation with the hotel app matches your aspirations for a free market that’s working, including “competition between companies drives low prices”?
My bad. I didn’t mean it as you, Ellito Temple, claiming it, but as a general comment on how I see it and why I have a problem with connecting “price controls” and laissez-fair economy. I.e. the “you” was not Elliot Temple but anyone in general.
Currently not the last part (“competition between companies drives low prices”). No.
For the record, I think you already know this, but I don’t think we currently have a free market.
I thought some more about this. New innovations like AirBnb usually emerge if prices and margins in a sector are kept high as they see a way to disrupt the current market. I think this is competition between companies that can drive prices down. Would you agree?
OK so I think you’re basically reversing yourself and agreeing that everything I actually said is correct. But you also asked me a bunch of argumentative, loaded questions and continued doing that after granting my main claim.
I have a lot of stuff I could say, but it goes beyond the original topic (which is the relatively simple matter, that you now grant, that the current hotel situation is problematic), and I don’t see much interest in a substantive, rational conversation here.
Overall, it looks to me like you have typical libertarian/Objectivist biases and approaches to conversation that basically cause political conversations to be unproductive. Basically you can’t talk with anti-capitalists, or about any ideas that you see as anti-capitalist, because you start bickering and trying to score debate points instead of listening. The biases are strong enough to ruin points of agreement – like instead of saying “yeah that situation is awful; here’s what I think explains/causes it…” you start defending awful, non-capitalist companies. (Anti-capitalists have their own biases that make it so most of them won’t talk productively with you or about capitalism, too. But I think your biases alone are enough to sabotage discourse.)
Sorry. It was not my intention to bicker or to try to score debate points.
Fair enough.
I still don’t understand why price fixing should not be ok in a laissez-fair economy (if that is your position - it might not be).
If it is your position and if you want to, feel free to explain it in simple terms. If you don’t want to that is of course fine, maybe someone else wants to. If not that either then that is fine as well.
I didn’t think you had conscious bad intentions. Most bad discussions don’t involve consciously-intended bad intentions. If you want to do better, you have to put sustained effort into learning to have discussions in some other way. You’re simply discussing in societally-default ways.
