(04-05-2022, 03:32 PM)ST Dog Wrote: So sure buy an extra. But not half a dozen.
I disagree. If someone wants to buy half a dozen, that's their free choice, and neither you nor I (nor government) should prevent them from doing so, as long as they can find someone willing to supply that product.
What would you suggest? The government enforcing an arbitrary limit to individual consumers? What would that limit be in your opinion? And what if your idea of a reasonable limit is 2 items, and yet the government says, "Sorry, only one". Because that's the only way to enforce it. Government rationing of supplies is what you seem to be suggesting.
What about having the free market (individual consumers) decide the demand, and allowing the individual companies creating the supply to meet that demand? If the demand increases, then companies who want to make money will increase their supply to the markets.
General consumer markets should be free from governmental interventions into the demand or supply of products. Rationing and/or price-fixing never works as intended. Ask Richard Nixon when he tried to have a wage and price freeze in the U.S. to control inflation, or when gasoline was rationed here in the U.S. It was a mess, and it made the problem worse.
Price controls, wage controls, rationing and central planning applied to the entire country are what communist nations attempt to implement. And it never works well. Even Russia and China have been forced to back-track from such extremes and have integrated more free market techniques into their supply chains. But we seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
Why is it that the first knee-jerk reaction for some is "the government has to do something about it"? What about allowing the free market to do what it does best - balance both supply and demand and allowing prices to stabilize based upon that?
This trend towards government-controlled economies is very bad. But when inflation comes and supply chain issues come, the socialists will be among the first to insist that the only solution is rationing, price controls and further restrictions upon the free market.
I'd suggest that y'all read some books on basic economics -- supply and demand issues specifically. But not the more "modern" economics books written by socialists that are now popular in our public universities.
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