This is a good example of capitalism optimizing for the wrong thing. We often hear people say that capitalism is efficient, but the context of what it’s efficient at accomplishing is crucial. In this case, capitalism is efficient at creating a lot of profit while being incredibly inefficient at actually ensuring that the food being produced ends up in the hands of people who need it.
One of the key-factors of me becoming a leftist was taking macro-economics in high school. Specifically when we were talking about food production and monopoly’s. Food production is a local monopoly because it is perishable. This limitation means that you don’t even have theoretical access to all markets, and producers aren’t really competing with each other on a macro scale. So your profit maximization strategy can be described by the second diagram on this page:
Which if you are familiar with macro economics shows that in a market economy, without government intervention, something as basic as the food supply will never meet the needs of the people because it’s more profitable not to!
Right, the goal is to make profit and any social value produced is strictly incidental. Another aspect of this is that the government itself serves the interest of the class that holds power. In a capitalist society this happens to be the capital owning class. These are the people who own the media, fund political campaigns, and so on. In my view, private ownership (where somebody owns a business and hires workers) is fundamentally at odds with having any sort of a democracy that actually represents the working majority. Every enterprise should be owned cooperatively.
This is a good example of capitalism optimizing for the wrong thing. We often hear people say that capitalism is efficient, but the context of what it’s efficient at accomplishing is crucial. In this case, capitalism is efficient at creating a lot of profit while being incredibly inefficient at actually ensuring that the food being produced ends up in the hands of people who need it.
One of the key-factors of me becoming a leftist was taking macro-economics in high school. Specifically when we were talking about food production and monopoly’s. Food production is a local monopoly because it is perishable. This limitation means that you don’t even have theoretical access to all markets, and producers aren’t really competing with each other on a macro scale. So your profit maximization strategy can be described by the second diagram on this page:
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/3201/economics/profit-maximisation/
Which if you are familiar with macro economics shows that in a market economy, without government intervention, something as basic as the food supply will never meet the needs of the people because it’s more profitable not to!
Right, the goal is to make profit and any social value produced is strictly incidental. Another aspect of this is that the government itself serves the interest of the class that holds power. In a capitalist society this happens to be the capital owning class. These are the people who own the media, fund political campaigns, and so on. In my view, private ownership (where somebody owns a business and hires workers) is fundamentally at odds with having any sort of a democracy that actually represents the working majority. Every enterprise should be owned cooperatively.