You're not going to escape your losing argument by way of vicious abstraction.
:lol: like it's
my fault you made a stupid point.
The owners of supply can certainly set prices, and they do
actually they can't unless they have a monopoly.
When they have a monopoly
when they have a monopoly, it is because they are being protected by, or
are government. The area's you mentioned (food, housing, etc) are not that, with the exception of utilities, which are protected by government and therefore
can get away with fixing prices.
especially if what they have to sell is a basic life necessity, such as housing, utilities, healthcare, food, etc..
then perhaps you can explain things like this?
or just generally
don't theories involving secretive cabals of super rich power brokers secretly controlling the levers of the world belong (for good reason) in the conspiracy forum?
And what do you do when there are no competitors, or when the competitors engage in price fixing and the government lets them get away with it.?
I demand a new set of government. You won't find me doing things like supporting agricultural subsidies.
If what you say is true, then that is something we will have to change, and will in fullness of time. The same corporate greed and inconsideration that were the motivation for unionization and collective bargaining will make it happen. Guaranteed.
the greed of people in corporations is no greater or less than the greed of people in unions. The difference being, in order to succeed, corporations have to
create something. Unions just have to
take something.
You seem to be forgetting that the fear of unionization is what keeps many employers conscientious of their employees salary demands.
:shrug: I would tend to suspect that with unions making up a vanishingly small percentage of the private workforce, that this is for
most employers a relatively small worry. What I've seen thus far has generally centered around an unwillingness to lose workers that one has trained, or that produce effectively, when others will require extra time and effort and lost productivity to get up to speed.
What is more, union membership has only declined because union jobs were outsourced to areas of the world where labor laws are lax and workers can be exploited to the same degree that they were in 19th century America.
Really? I'll be sure to ask my brother who works in auto manufacturing about that. I'll write an email perhaps, or maybe just ask him next time I'm visiting him at the Toyota plant in Kentucky.
You ever wonder why it's
unionized companies that have to seek elsewhere? You raise the cost of something beyond what the market will bear... and it won't bear it for long.
no, it is reality. Housing prices aren't set by some kind of "Cabal Of Nabobs".
Clearly, the people who build the homes and sell them on the market set the price for their product---usually at whatever they feel they can get for it, which is ultimately determined by the salaries earned by their potential buyers.
supply and demand. housing prices fall and rise by supply and demand. however, you are right to point out that generally below the cost of production there is no supply.
Thus, (to put it very simply) if their potential buyers are union workers, and these union workers have just negotiated a substantial raise in salary, the cost of housing will, not coincidentally, go up.
if the demand for money v housing decreases, then the demand for housing increases and so does the price. what you are describing is inflation, where that occurs.
To what deflationary environment are you referring?
the one
you referenced, wherein the price of everything but labor decreases.
The present economy would best be described as schizophrenic, with the cost of housing declining (in the wake of an artificially created housing bubble) while the cost of just about everything else is going up, much higher than indicated by the CPI which does not appear to take into account product downsizing wherein the consumer pays the same price for less product. (What we all see happening every time we go to the supermarket.)
why must housing be special? we had a bubble, it popped. The government is trying to reinflate the bubble because that's a feel-good policy, and so it continues to suffer. In the meantime, the nominal price of food does indeed increase, along with a smaller increase in the real price due to artificial energy shortages. You are right that inflation is reported lower than it actually is due to the fact that they don't count food and energy, though. What did we think was going to happen when we started to monetize the debt?