What I find fascinating about these kinds of legitimate complaints and the comments here and elsewhere is nobody wants to talk about the root cause: capitalism. What I've come to realize is Americans in particular can't define capitalism but will die on the hill of defending it. Another casualty of the Red Scare. Let me explain.
People often like farmers markets. People like locally grown produce. People like Mom and Pop stores over big chains. These things aren't strictly true but they're generally true.
Walmart is capitalism. A farmer's market is socialism. Your local Italian restaurant run by a family of immigrants is socialism. Olive Garden is capitalism.
What's the difference? Easy. The worker's relationship to the means of production. If you buy from a local grower at a farmer's market, that grower likely owns their farm and any production facilities. If you buy from Walmart, you're paying the Walton family, Blackstone, Vanguard and all the other shareholders (or capital owners). That money leaves your community.
This is rent-seeking behavior. And it's exactly what private equity is. What additionally makes private equity profitable are the legal enclosures PE firms create to increase profits at your expense. So they'll buy a medical practice, which was previously owned by the doctors most likely, and jack up the prices to pay off the LBO and their investors. They then use noncompetes to stop those medical practitioners in that local area or state (depdning on what they can get away with).
At this stage of capitalism, every aspect of your life is getting financialized. Housing, health care, education, vets, food, water, utilities and so on. In every one of them is rent-seeking behavior to use the legal system to create an enclosure for them to jack up prices at your expense.
Terence is a smart guy but the word "capitalism" doesn't appear once. Instead there's lip service to the notion of "economies of scale". This is in part propaganda. Why? Because if it were really true, why do all these large companies need legal protections of their business? Like states who ban municipal broadband?
Secondly, Terence notes essentially the destruction of community. This is an intentional goal of neoliberalism because any form of community or collectivism is dangerous to a neoliberal project. Also, people spending time on community is lost profit for some company who would rather you were creating shareholder value instead.
Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically luxuries for wealthy people. In the real world, we try to feed as many people as possible for as cheaply as possible. But sure, let's grow everything locally and let people starve, because farmers markets give us fuzzy warm feelings of a utopia that never existed. And capitalism bad.
This is why I used this example because you've just demonstrated that you don't know what socialism is. There is a myth that capitalism is "free markets". First, there's no such thing as a free market. All markets require regulation to function. Second, markets exist in every organization of the economy and existed long before capitalism existed. We have records of such from Sumeria from 4000+ years ago. In late feudalism, serfs would sell the food they grew to pay their fedual landlord, an early from of taxation.
> Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically luxuries for wealthy people.
Walmart is one of the most heavily subsidized businesses on Earth. Directly you have agricultural subsidies but another is food stamps paid to Walmart employees [1] as well as Medicaid. Why? Because Walmart pays below a living wage.
Also, Walmart is known for setting up in a town, selling their products at below cost to kill all local businesses and then jacking up the prices, if not leaving outright, creating a new food desert.
As for locally grown food being expensive, that's not really true once you look at the bigger picture. We've seen this pattern play out in every country the IMF and Wolrd Bank have gotten involved in. The IMF/WB place conditions such that local farmers can no longer produce crops to feed their populations. Those they have to buy from the West. Instead, farmers have to grow export crops to earn foreign currency to service debt.
In the short term this lowers food prices but forces all the farmers off their land. They then have to move to cities to seek work and/or become a drain on the state.
Inevitably, with and without manipulation, the local currency collapses and locals can no longer afford that foreign food. It's entirely predatory. A system was destroyed for foreign bankers. This is almost exactly what happened in Haiti and Somalia, to name just two examples.
Now if the community owned that supermarket, this predation just wouldn't happen. In other words, it's the worker's relationship to the means of production.
> Walmart is one of the most heavily subsidized businesses on Earth. Directly you have agricultural subsidies but another is food stamps paid to Walmart employees [1] as well as Medicaid. Why? Because Walmart pays below a living wage.
No, food stamps are a subsidy /against/ Walmart, not for it. They're paid to the worker and increase the worker's negotiating power. An example of a subsidy to Walmart would be wage supplements used to get businesses to hire low-functioning disabled people.
Although if you're also arguing Medicaid is a subsidy for Walmart you might just be fedposting (as leftists call it now) or a wrecker (as they used to call it). Do you think any good thing in the world is a subsidy for Walmart simply because it's not being forced to pay for all of it? Because you're arguing against food stamps and Medicaid here, two good things.
> If you buy from Walmart, you're paying the Walton family, Blackstone, Vanguard and all the other shareholders (or capital owners).
BlackRock[0] and Vanguard don't "own capital", they manage retirement funds. The people who own the retirement funds own the capital. That would be you.
[0] not Blackstone. People on social media seem to confuse these two a lot, like with that totally false claim that houses are expensive because BlackRock bought them all.
> Also, Walmart is known for setting up in a town, selling their products at below cost to kill all local businesses and then jacking up the prices, if not leaving outright, creating a new food desert.
The evidence is fairly strong that food deserts are mainly caused by a confusing definition of "food deserts".
Oh boy you got me good! How could I have fallen for such a clever ruse.
This actually isn't complicated. Who owns the farm + stand? Again, maybe you meant farming collective, one last chance.
I don't really know who you think you're arguing against, but free markets can exist as a theoretical idealization, you know, like some other systems I'm guessing you're fond of.
Btw, if a farmers stand is socialism, then certainly I can say Walmart with subsidization via food stamps most definitely isn't capitalism.
Every actual fact you state I agree with. As for your theories and straw men, I'll leave to you.
Just as an exercise, try to run through the mental trajectory that got you to your rant on free markets and Sumeria and shit. What is going on there? You have some enemy in your head your imagining you're dunking on?
> nobody wants to talk about the root cause: capitalism.
If you both believe capitalism is evil and that no one wants to talk about it (while you do), you should definitely rethink the circles you frequent. And we’re discussing a Mastodon post, of all platforms, just search for #capitalism and you’ll find no end of critiques.
People often like farmers markets. People like locally grown produce. People like Mom and Pop stores over big chains. These things aren't strictly true but they're generally true.
Walmart is capitalism. A farmer's market is socialism. Your local Italian restaurant run by a family of immigrants is socialism. Olive Garden is capitalism.
What's the difference? Easy. The worker's relationship to the means of production. If you buy from a local grower at a farmer's market, that grower likely owns their farm and any production facilities. If you buy from Walmart, you're paying the Walton family, Blackstone, Vanguard and all the other shareholders (or capital owners). That money leaves your community.
This is rent-seeking behavior. And it's exactly what private equity is. What additionally makes private equity profitable are the legal enclosures PE firms create to increase profits at your expense. So they'll buy a medical practice, which was previously owned by the doctors most likely, and jack up the prices to pay off the LBO and their investors. They then use noncompetes to stop those medical practitioners in that local area or state (depdning on what they can get away with).
At this stage of capitalism, every aspect of your life is getting financialized. Housing, health care, education, vets, food, water, utilities and so on. In every one of them is rent-seeking behavior to use the legal system to create an enclosure for them to jack up prices at your expense.
Terence is a smart guy but the word "capitalism" doesn't appear once. Instead there's lip service to the notion of "economies of scale". This is in part propaganda. Why? Because if it were really true, why do all these large companies need legal protections of their business? Like states who ban municipal broadband?
Secondly, Terence notes essentially the destruction of community. This is an intentional goal of neoliberalism because any form of community or collectivism is dangerous to a neoliberal project. Also, people spending time on community is lost profit for some company who would rather you were creating shareholder value instead.