Re: Three Body Problem

On Thu, 22 Aug 2024, Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 8/21/2024 10:41 AM, Paul S Person wrote:
...

No Paul, you are wrong here. Any common sense interpretation of that text
makes it obvious that Lynn is right and you are wrong.

 Paul is correct.   A ban on price gouging is _not_ the same as
price controls.
 One might even go so far as suggesting that the inability of the
federal government to enforce the anti-trust laws have increased
the frequency of price gouging.  Particularly in the grocery
industry which has overly consolidated over since 1980.

 I noted elsewhere that what should have been an unrelated book
reminded me how much of the Federal control was put into place in a
era very much like our own. Anti-trust laws, food content regulation,
associated laws and associated Federal agencies stem from those times.
 Perhaps this is the first glimmer of what further Federal controls and
even agencies will be added /this/ time around.
 1%-ers, it seems, never learn.

>
Please tell me of any country that put price controls on food that survived that act as a democracy or a republic.
>
BTW, the number one national seller of food in the USA is Walmart. Walmart disrupted the grocery industry severely in the 1990s when they added groceries to all of their stores.  Are you going to accuse Walmart of price fixing ?  Walmart is where the poor go to shop, they know where the best deal is.
>
Lynn
>

At the risk of widening the discussion a bit, I recommend Johan Norbergs, "The Capitalist Manifesto" where he shows in a very easy to understand way, with plenty of references for his data, how capitalism has made us, as a species, richer than ever at this present moment, compared with any other historical era, and how too much government control destroys that trend in the countries that try the socialist experiment.
For some here, I think it would be a very good and eye opening read. I also think it is easy to think that government is a solution, when you have lived all your life in the US and never experienced yourself, full force, how bad things become when the government tries to "fix" things.
All people I meet in eastern europe are pretty much united in their disgust of socialism, since they experienced it during the soviet era and no one wants that back. The only ones who want it back are old people who used to work for the party, who were at the top, but those people are far and few in between.