Couldn’t the collective threat that everyone just diasporas mitigate inflation if businesses tried to pull any funny business?
Why does it work for Monaco?
Is inflation always discretionary? Who is behind “unnecessary” inflation (insofar as all inflation isn’t unnecessary) and why aren’t they punished and deterred?
When businesses inflate why don’t we just inflate their taxes so they are always already have been and are actively being tracked and mitigated to the point its useless to pull such bullshit?
Like in Sunny in Philadelphia where Dee reveals she’s been double-dropping and Dennis drops that they’ve been deducting the difference from her purse the whole time 😅
Sellers raise their prices because they have buyers ready to pay that higher price.
Say your have the best restaurant in town and you have a line down the street and everyday you sell out of food before lunch. If you raise your prices the line will get shorter as some of your more price sensitive customers decide to go elsewhere. Keep raising them and your shop will be empty as nobody wants your food at those prices. The “right price” is where you get the most money you can for the work that you do in a day. Right?
You should be looking at your wages exactly the same. Ask for 10k per hour and you’re going to be jobless. As for 5 per hour and you’re gonna have lots of offers but not make enough money. Try to find the “right” wage. This is why wages have been going up faster than inflation pretty much every quarter since some time in 2022.
And no, we shouldn’t punish you or our hypothetical restaurant owner for setting your prices properly.
Also, taxes don’t remove money from the economy so it would be neutral from an inflation standpoint. But that’s a much longer story.
How would this similar dynamic apply to say, like potato chips and a grocery store, both who are overcharging and/or shrinkflating?
If there is somebody willing to pay more for what is ultimately a limited supply of potatoes, why not sell to them. If the price per ounce of chips is too high for you, you’ll buy less chips. People who just can’t live without those chips might buy less candy to make sure they can afford them.
All the while people who make chips are asking for raises because the chip market is hot and the boss just can’t get enough people into the plant to make them. The workers know their boss needs them badly so they are comfortable asking for more. The boss relents because he needs them in there making those chips or he’s gonna lose money with potatoes rotting in the warehouse.
There will be a big business then…
Disclaimer: Theoretical Speculation
If everyone was rich, money would become useless…
So…its like audio equalization if you increase or decrease to the exact same proportions.
Ironically, I have a heavy preference for reducing treble so am I doing in my audio what society should do economically? Lol
Umm, something like that, I guess…
Again, just speculation, but if everyone had roughly the same amount of money (assuming the concept of spreading the butter equally), then nobody would want to earn money, and nothing would get done.
How many people are rich and continue to amass wealth even though they have more money than they really know what to do with?
How many important projects are done by volunteers?
How many old people work jobs they don’t need just to keep themselves social and busy?
And in that hypothetical scenario, money still exists, it’s just equally distributed. There’ll still be people who want more, people who waste what they have and need a top-up, etcetc.
I don’t think that’s true. I think if everyone was rich, nobody would be. Everyone would be “middle class”, if you can even talk about class any more. Doesn’t sound too bad tbh.
There would still be class, but it would be based on things like social status and education instead of financial status.
I feel that is implicit in OPs question - I mean if it’s not equally rich, how is it different from what reality is right now? Anyways maybe OP can clarify.
It would only be a temporary fix. Robert Nozick gives the example of the famous basketball player as a critique of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance argument.
Suppose everyone had equal wealth but we remained different individuals with our own personalities, abilities, etc. For simplicity, assume everyone has $100 each and there are a million people in total. Now suppose one person is actually a legendary basketball player (Nozick uses Wilt Chamberlain as an example) and he decides to play basketball in the NBA to entertain everyone else. But he doesn’t do it for free, he charges each person $1 for a ticket to see him play.
If everyone pays to see him play basketball, he becomes a millionaire while everyone else becomes $1 poorer. In effect, the balance of total equality has been broken.
How do you solve this problem? You might say that he’s not allowed to charge $1 for people to see him play basketball but then what you’re really saying is that everyone is not allowed to spend their $1 to see a basketball game. So it’s actually not possible to preserve the state of total equality without taking away people’s economic freedom (that is, the freedom to decide how to spend their $100).
Thus you either gradually revert to inequality or you make all money worthless by taking away people’s choices on what to spend (and so you might as well just have a ration system instead).
Economic freedom in this example is pure nonsense. I don’t want the freedom to overpay for something. The price point is also completely unreasonable. There are alternatives that could be implemented, like setting limits. Your example has a clear goal of promoting a certain world view that the existence of slavery is what makes us free. If that’s not a paradox a don’t know what a paradox is.
I think the questions you’re asking require the oversimplification of the real world to the point where even if someone gave you an “answer” it would be close to meaningless. Specifically, not everyones looks at changing geographic locations through a lens of pure economics.
You’re all over the place, but I personally believe the biggest issue is people look at economic systems and ask things like “how can we maximize our production and consumption power?”
The “solution” is for everyone to come to an agreement on how much of something is “enough” and work forward from that baseline. This is incredibly difficult because people have different priorities, and getting people to agree on how much food, fuel, and infrastructure should be produced and consumed per capita would be a huge challenge. Capitalist economic systems allow people to more easily distance themselves from the moral problem of greed by saying things like “If I can make $5,000 that means I earned the right to consume $5,000 worth of goods.” But the real world “value” of making $5,000 from construction work on housing is vastly different than the value produced from selling a $5,000 NFT.
Since the term “rich” is relative, I assume the question is in relation to other nations.
If it’s a capitalist nation, I don’t think it would last long. Low incentive to work, coupled with strong international purchasing power, would allow those who spend to drive down their net worth while those who invest increase it. It wouldn’t take more than a few years to begin a notable separation of classes.
