Anti-Capitalist Sentiment (with some morality)

[Renton]

Costco is a great example of how pro business and pro labor go hand in hand. Henry Ford also recognized this. Sure you can pay bottom dollar for your labor pool, have high turn over, and a weak corporate culture, or you can pay top dollar and have your pick of the best labor, who will stick around and ensure stability in your business. Both can be viable strategies, but the idea that a busboy is a busboy is a busboy ridiculous. Sure, labor acts like a commodity in some ways, but it also resembles business's infrastructure in other ways. Labor is far to dynamic to simply slot into the "commodity" column and forget about it. Your models will not be representative of reality if you do so.

1) If the costco business model is so much better than the wal-mart one, then we can expect other businesses to copy it. Seems fine/optimal. No one is stopping companies from taking what they feel are more proactive measures than the standard minimize costs at any costs model. There is no need to mess with a system that is already working.

2) I never said that a busboy is a busboy. Labor can be a commodity and still be dynamic. A fresh, plump, and juicy apple from the fruit stand is worth more and should cost more than the withered wormy apple in the adjacent basket. A busboy that is far more productive than the average should have an easier time finding a job and be paid more than average to do that job. And if he isn't, he reserves the right to demand that pay, and the company reserves the right to reject, and another restaurant in dire need of a quality busboy can take him on at a wage he'd be happier with. Nothing in capitalism inherently disallows or even discourages this kind of activity from happening. And a busboy's union only serves to punish the quality people by strongarming companies into paying an arbitrary wage to any busboy regardless of quality.

Renton, "The milk is going ot taste better and better"


Actually, no, the milk, and most mass produced food we eat tastes worse and worse. Yield and visual aesthetics come far before any consideration of flavor in much of the food industry. The exception is when the goal is to engineer foods which trigger our evolved cravings for things rare in nature, like fatty, salty, sweet, etc. The concentrated triggers are often given a cheap filler delivery method, such as the puffed corn which carries the salty "cheese" coating in a Cheeto. These taste "better and better" only in the sense that they work on a very base level to encourage the consumption of stuff which should not be consumed in any quantity. They're essentially lacing Styrofoam with crack. Mmmm, better and better.

I know better than to go head to head with j-dawd on food but I will refute as best I can.

For one, what I said is true and what you said is true as well. The point is that where theres a market for something, the market will become better and better at providing that something. Something being whatever people see value in and are willing to buy.

Staying with the milk example, yes I'm sure theres a market for delicious organic milk and suppliers are competing over that market by innovating in various ways, either by reducing their costs (and thus the price) or increasing the quality. There's also probably a market for cheap but bare-minimum quality milk, and respective suppliers making respective innovations to that product as well.

The point of my milk rant was that a state-based milk industry has far less incentive to innovate in any way, thats all.