Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
Utility is nonsense. It does nothing to help you understand and actively hurts you by masking the things you don't understand.

And I do believe that people can profit from trade. I do not believe that people must always profit from every trade. That there can be trades that benefit only one side, but that will still happen frequently because of the nature of people.

And the QVC example, all I see is a channel that hits every single sales-trick in the book and manages to sell overpriced crap to people who won't use it for profit year over year.
From the point of view of subjective value, all voluntary trade has mutual benefit. There's really no better way of ascribing value to anything than by assuming that if someone traded X for Y, they valued Y more than X and vice versa for the other guy. Sure, an omniscient observer can have a clearer picture of whether the trade was one sided, but unless you start arbitrarily ascribing value to things, it's hard to definitively state that any trade was one-sided.

It's funny, I feel warm and fuzzy when I see QVC. I see it as the result of a society that has become so extravagantly wealthy that most people have the disposable income to buy a 80th Annual Mickey Mouse Commemorative Toast Butterer, mostly thanks to a capitalistic economy. I see all of the lucky people who are escaping from a thousand-generation-long subsistence farming lifestyle to get paid 5 times as much to make dumb crap for white people to waste money on. This is wealth redistribution I can get behind.