It's more possible than you think for people who share the same ethnic background to have had radically different experiences from each other, and people who look very different from each other to have gone through very similar life stories.
I'm not just saying this in theory (which is trivially true) -- I lived in a stereotypically liberal cosmopolitan city where most people I encountered, despite the visible diversity in their ethnic backgrounds, all had four-year degrees, worked in high-paying knowledge-based jobs, and had no experience in military service or single motherhood; then in a much smaller city in a stereotypically conservative rural state where most people were of the same ethnic background, but had more variety in what they went through in life. My own habits did not change between the two cities as to put me in touch with such a different group of people between them.
This is just anecdata, but I question the premise you appear to take for granted.
> Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me.
In what way is this obviously fallacious? Alms have to come from somewhere, and if you take them from the rich then it is clearly discrimination against the rich. You could very well make the argument that this is justified, but fallacious it is not.
That aside, it doesn't take a lot of scanning through those who purportedly wish to give alms to the poor before you find some outright revenge-driven rhetoric.
It’s also a broken analogy because “the rich” are always more privileged than “the poor”, but a given white person may be less privileged than a given nonwhite person.
> You could very well make the argument that this is justified
Discrimination isn't just "we treat people differently" - we put prisoners in jail, we don't trust liars, we try to keep abusers away from positions of power.
Discrimination is when it crosses the line into injustice - when you're acting solely off hatred and stereotypes.
Since you're conceding that it's justified, it seems that no actual injustice is occurring here.
Funnily enough, the poor having some more money often makes the rich wealthier in absolute terms just not in relative terms. The poor having money juices the economy a lot more than the rich having yet more money. Similarly with more diversity everyone is better off.
Why would anybody want to trade with Mr. Smith's contract in particular when a market for the contract still exists, with market makers and other participants providing bids and offers that is better what Mr. Smith can do? At least, assuming you are talking about a regulated commodities futures contracts like those which trade on the CME.
Mr Smith has a real for delivery contract, not a more common contract to own for some amount of time but no clue who is on either end. As such if you buy from Mr Smith you get real goods, while from someone else you may discover that you created a short squeeze, and not actual material is available: they may have to pay you a ton of $$$ to get out of the contract, but you don't actually get anything delivered.
If you really want the actual good and not the dollars, then you should by buying contracts backed by real goods that cannot be shorted. By contrast if you just want to make money there is more money in buying the contact that is a short with no material behind it. Of course knowing when a short squeeze will happen is left as an exercise for the reader - meaning I have no idea when this plan can work out only that once in a while it does.
If most buyers buy ahead like Mr Smith, then the liquidity in the spot market can dry up, especially in times of supply constraint.
Mr Smith and many people like him might happily sell on his steel for 10x the price he paid for it to someone desperate for some steel.
Yet, as things stand now, whenever there is severe market disruption, you frequently find goods aren't available for any price. Thats simply because Mr Smith and people like him continue to take delivery of the steel he ordered 6 months ago, and doesn't actually need right now, because he isn't aware of the guy down the street who really reeds it right away and will pay a lot.
If all goods are always 'for sale', then goods can be allocated efficiently to whoever needs them most.
Obviously we cannot do controlled experiments here the same way we can in the physical sciences, but it seems that historical evidence is pretty clear by this point on whether freer markets perform better than ones with more government intervention.
This is one of those things, though, where the boring position is that "relatively free markets are good, but markets also require some government intervention to function well". It's not exciting or edgy, and not at all simple, because it's tricky to figure out which regulations and how much are good, and how they should change over time and so on.
"Some government intervention" has dramatically increased over the past century (after having stayed relatively flat for the century before that, since Adam Smith first came into the scene with groundbreaking ideas), so the boring position isn't so boring anymore. The government has their fingers in so many pies these days it's hard to say what even are the remaining relatively free markets.
Agreed. At this point the main question seems to be about to what extent you can add any knobs to a free market via reserve requirements and interest rates and taxes and government spending. I happen to think a lot of that is voodoo that tends to backfire, but I think adding knobs can work better in some places if you do it right and that it’s a legitimate and unresolved (and probably unresolvable without a crazy experiment) empirical question.
Ultimately the more I read the more I recognize my own ignorance about a lot of this stuff and think the more most people are more ignorant than they realize. That’s why I tend to gravitate towards systems that maximize freedom at the national/international level, as I think any restrictions that need to exist tend to be emergent locally if allowed.
That's not how it works! You can't just make up a valuation when you donate things, and whatever higher valuation you get, you have now incurred capital gains on which you must pay taxes.
This article seems to be suggesting in Scenario 5 that under certain circumstances a person (in the US) can receive the full (appraised) market value of a donated art work as a tax deduction:
(There's a great deal of art and artifacts in museums and galleries around the world that have been donated "in lieu of taxation")
It also talks about how prices for art can be driven by a cycle of especially wealthy people being willing to pay large amounts of money for art.
> Because each donated work of art has a subjective value that is assessed by an appraiser and then after a period can be put back into the art market by the museum, art can be caught in a cycle of continuous increasing value, moving between private ownership and museums. When you take into consideration the exclusivity of the market and socio-economic factors that make the market highly responsive to high social standing and influence, which encourages selling art to the most high standing individuals and close business associates, we can see several financial and social results. First, we see that charitable deductions taken from art donations disproportionally benefit the wealthy
while providing a benefit of subjective value to the receiving organization.
And that fact that people can donate their art to their own private museums (on their own property), with public access available at certain times of the year, by appointment.
Only tangentially related, but let's not fall into the fallacy of the middleman -- middlemen are only bad if they are legally or otherwise monopolistically required to be there. In other situations, they add value in the connecting of producers and consumers.
What value or service are they providing, and which "producers" and "consumers" are they connecting? In fact, they do have a monopoly wrt. their customers: they can credit themselves assets by creating a matching liability – inside the confines of regulatory limits – while ordinary people and businesses can't, and thus they have to pay the bank a fee to do that for them and give them the money.
One man's environmental crisis is another man being lifted out of crushing poverty by the abundant energy and wealth produced by that same industrialization and profit motive.
Unless you think cavemen shouldn't have burned sticks for warmth out of concern for CO2 emissions, the way out for humanity will be through (further technological gains enabling more energy expended per capita, hopefully cleanly), not backwards.
> One man's environmental crisis is another man being lifted out of crushing poverty by the abundant energy and wealth produced by that same industrialization and profit motive.
The problem with that is it's only one man that gets the benefit.
Yes, I'm twisting your words a bit. The point I'm making is that these profit motives tend towards capital hoarding by individuals. _That_ process tends towards selfish decision making where the only long-term benefit is the individual and their family, often at the cost of short and long term damage or hinderance to other people and the environment. I confess I make many such decisions myself, but it's very hard not within our current economic system.
I'm not arguing for a return to some imaginary glory projected onto images from the past at all. I'm trying to feel out ideas for future systems more of us can engage with comfortably, which don't promote the double hit of individual-focused power imbalances and environmental damage.
Burning sticks isn't increasing the amount of carbon in the natural cycle (unlike digging up fossil fuels and burning them). Though obviously if enough people burn them faster than nature can regrow them it's still a problem, such that 8 billion of us returning to trees as our primary source of fuel would be pretty catastrophic.
Seems strange that we'd optimize for making modifications easier, when such modifications are much fewer and farther between than the everyday living that fills the time between, during which people value a solid wall with no gaps or seams.
Of course, not everyone values the same things to the same degree, and a homeowner could cut a 4x8 piece of drywall into smaller pieces and have more easily removable panels like you're imagining.
"In any market" is too strong a statement. In markets with high barriers to entry or other factors that make it less competitive, sure, and we call them natural monopolies. But you're claiming that every market is a natural monopoly.
yes some markets take longer times and sometime tech changes so we never reach the end. but the end result is always the same as long as firms are involved. It's a feature of capitalism.
It's not some immutable law of capitalism. There is such a thing as diseconomies of scale, where firms that are too large end up being less competitive and unable to innovate as quickly. Once they reach that size they might borrow the power of government to crush competition and retain their monopoly, but at that point we may as well it call a feature of socialism, not of capitalism.
I'd be surprised if in twenty years of market forces (that is, assuming neither government antitrust action nor cronyist behavior making competitors illegal) more people were using Google for search than they are now.
I'm not just saying this in theory (which is trivially true) -- I lived in a stereotypically liberal cosmopolitan city where most people I encountered, despite the visible diversity in their ethnic backgrounds, all had four-year degrees, worked in high-paying knowledge-based jobs, and had no experience in military service or single motherhood; then in a much smaller city in a stereotypically conservative rural state where most people were of the same ethnic background, but had more variety in what they went through in life. My own habits did not change between the two cities as to put me in touch with such a different group of people between them.
This is just anecdata, but I question the premise you appear to take for granted.