• Chickenstalker@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    How so? In my country, certain basic food items are priced capped AND rationed, meaning you’re only allowed to buy a certain amount of it at a time.

    > but but but muh freedum market$$

    No! Worldwide, the agricultural sector is THE MOST SUBSIDISED economic field. You can’t have it both ways. If taxpayers’ money is used to prop up your business, you have a duty to the taxpayers and country.

    • Cleverdawny@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Subsidies may distort the market but they don’t change the existence of the supply/demand curve. Any producer of a product is going to sell their goods to the highest bidder, and if someone is capping what a product can sell for that means capping what they can purchase the product for. Grocery stores aren’t going to sell for a loss.

      If the central government enacts a scheme of rationing and central purchasing, that’s one thing. But in a free market situation if a grocery in country A will buy lentils for €1 a kg and country B can only pay €.50 then the lentils are getting sold to country A until that demand is fulfilled. Which means shortages in country B.

      • ObliviousEnlightenment@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Considering how much billionaires hoard, im happy just tacking a sales quota on at the same time so they just have to eat losses for a bit. People eating is more important, and frankly anything that forces the robber barons to lose money back into the system is a good thing

          • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            They could, and if they do, the land it occupied should be seized and turned into a community owned cooperative.

            • Cleverdawny@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Cool, so, the government can just turn into bandits if we don’t like what private citizens do on their own land. Oh, and if they complain, why not just send them to the gulag?

              • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Yeah it’s not cool to seize commercially zoned land when a corporation is idling on it because it doesn’t like a policy, that’s a communism guys!

                However, seizing residential land so that we can build another casino on it… that’s just the wonderous free market at work!

                Edit: eminent domain isn’t communism, pick up a grade school civics book

                • Cleverdawny@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  Eminent domain involves compensation at fair market value, not theft. And typically, we use property taxes to motivate property owners to find economically productive uses for their land/buildings.

                  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    a) you’d be surprised how little the “fair market value” often is under eminent domain

                    b) no we don’t, if we did we’d be largely following georgism… The majority of current property taxes tax improvements on the land, not the land itself. It’s often cheaper to have an empty lot than a functioning business.

              • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                A society that values an individuals right to profit over the collectives right to eat is not a just or moral society, and it is the collective responsibility of the many to change the society to preclude from such possibilities. If that means sending mentally ill speculators and unethical industrial farmers to prison, then so be it. Better than sending the poor and minorities there for crimes of poverty only necessitated by others greed in the first place.

                Speaking of gulags, why does the US have both the highest prison population and highest per capita prison population in the world, if we don’t already send people to the gulag?

                • Cleverdawny@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  You might have a point if communist nations didn’t have a history of dismal agricultural failures and capitalist countries didn’t have a history of food surplus. Lmao

                  Also, whataboutism with the US prison population doesn’t excuse locking up political prisoners, since you’re apparently fine apologizing for that.

                  • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    Political prisoners like Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Fred Burton, “Xinachitli” Alvaro Hernandez, Reverend Joy Powell, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader and Shukri Abu-Baker, Eric King, Daniel Hale, Alex Saab, Ed Poindexter, Veronza Bowers, Jessica Reznicek, Emmanuel Quinones, or any of the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers illegally detained at the border and held in concentration camps every year? Or lest we forget Edward Snowden, who fled the nation to avoid becoming a political prisoner, or Chelsea Manning who spent 7 years as a political prisoner, or Julian Assange of course?

                    Look, I’m not defending political prisoners, I’m calling out your random talk of gulag as what it is, a lack of reflection on the most heavily criminalized and incarcerated society in known history and a rabid reactionary whataboutism when faced with the inherent injustice the system we currently have represents.