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Cake day: July 14th, 2024

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  • The oxymoronic identity is libertarianism. It masquerades as anarchy but doesn’t oppose capitalist oppression.

    I see a pattern here - you’re operating on a twisted set of definitions - this isn’t the first time I’m seeing this when debating people online

    Particularly, you have completly different definition of anarchy. You probably consider it some sort of organized social system, but I consider it lack of any framework being enforced.

    If you don’t understand the difference between these definitions, you can’t have any dialogue.

    With the definition I use (and many other people BTW), basically anarcho-anything is an oxymoron. When somone talks about anarcho-capitalism, it’s nothing but gibberish to me.

    In light of different definition, consider this:

    Libertarianism has nothing to do with anarchy - it’s a system that minimizes state intervention to the absolute minimum, leaving as much to free market forces as possible, providing only minimal legal rails for enforcement of agreements.

    There’s no paradox here if you run with that thought process.


  • Your point seems to be that you think grocery store food waste is a matter of too much regulation

    I thought it’s a mater of public health and safety.

    I can’t argue with someone who treats capitalism like a deity

    I can’t ignore what I see. And I see, computers, airplanes, modern agriculture, and all the wonders of modern civilization.

    You come across like a libertarian

    I was a libertarian as a teenager, but with time I understood that every extremism is pathological. I’d say I’m a liberal now.

    You’re the biggest capitalism simp I’ve encountered in quite some time

    It’s always gets personal with you people. You can’t win the debate and you get angry.

    oxymoronic political identity.

    Which part of my identity is oxymoronic? You throw accusations but you never give any examples.



  • Grocery stores dump good food all the time

    My relative happens to work in the food trade industry. The only cases when they dump food is either when expiration date is passing, or when they suspect that frozen stuff was transported incorrectly - aka cooling/freezing chain was broken somewhere - in that case they just don’t accept the transport - it’s most likely dumped afterwards by the company delivering it.

    Sale of expired food is forbidden by law.

    As a worker you are only hired and remain employed insofar as you produce more value for the company than you cost

    Of course. Also as a worker I remain hired and employed as long as the employer delivers me more value (aka wage and other benefits) than his competitors. Otherwise I dump him just like he’d dump me.


  • We waste tremendous amounts of food but people go hungry.

    This waste may look big in absolute numbers, but probably isn’t meaningful as percentage of total economy - we’re wealthy so many of us can afford to be a little wasteful.

    Capitalism optimizes for profit and profit only. Sometimes that leads to good outcomes, sometimes it leads to bad outcomes.

    Usually bad outcomes are the corner cases - I’m perfectly aware that they exist (harmful monopolies, CO2, ect.) But it’s the role of solid legal framework to deal with these issues.

    On the other hand you have at best no idea what sort of pathologies can arise in alternatives to capitalism, and at worst it can be repeat of the of USSR or North Korea.


  • someone is going to have to address the mismatch between wages and cost of living.

    Everything in “Cost of living” basket is delivered by the same economy that tends towards reduction of prices - assuming it’s healthy competitive market. I believe that at least in case of US, housing market and Healthcare are particularly corrupted, which drags prices up.

    but the inevitable 90% of “losers”

    I don’t believe there are 90% of “losers” if you said bottom 10-20% earners in the society, I’d might agree - there’s always some percentage of people who can’t make the ends meet.



  • You’re missing the part of the picture: There are also workers with specific skill sets who are paid extremely well. You don’t hear about them, because they don’t complain.

    But the question is why? Why workers with certain skills really well paid, while others aren’t?

    The answer is misalignment between availability of types of work, and availability of workers with appropriate skills.

    There’s no magic solution that would fix this - core issue is education system that produces surplus of one type of skilled workers and not enough of other types. The end result are huge wages for rare skills, and very low wages for common ones

    Fixing that problem requires radical reform of how people pick their career patch and it would take many years for benefits to have impact.



  • workers that produce wealth and are essential

    You got it wrong - workers alone won’t produce anything. You need everything: Workers, managers, accountants, capital, financial system, machines, supply chains, logistics, customer acquisition and so on. Each one of these parts is crucial - wealth is only produced if all those elements are correctly allocated.

    Half of these things are provided by separate companies, which have their own complex structures, that together create wealth producing market environment.

    “I’m a worker so I produce wealth!” Is a harmful simplification. Skilled worker without all that backend isn’t worth a jack shit. This is why there’re so huge wage disparities between poor and rich countries - workers may be equally skilled, but the backend that supports the work in the poor country simply doesn’t exist.

    markets fail very often when the incentives and structure are not aligned with the socially desired outcomes.

    There’re corner cases that cause issues - but this is why we have legal framework to fix them - antitrust laws, regulation of relations between employee-emplyer, consumer protection, green energy incentives and so on