this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
842 points (97.8% liked)

Comic Strips

12435 readers
3290 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] -3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

People die of starvation in a world that literally has enough food for everyone - because speculating with food is more profitable than feeding them

Give me an example of starvation, past or present, that resulted from something other than uncontrollable weather, or government interfering with the food market?

I’ll take as many examples as you can give me, but one is probably a good place to start.

People die of diseases that have known cures with low production cost

I agree

because the market will only finance medical research if the resulting drug comes with a net gain price tag.

Wouldn’t people dying of diseases with known cures be a problem with the market not producing known drugs, and not a problem of research?

Wal-mart’s recent entry into the insulin market comes to mind. A capitalist endeavor if there ever was one, immediately rushing in to make profits by saving lives the moment they are permitted to do so by the government.

As a result of Wal-Mart’s acting like a profit seeking capitalist endeavor, insulin dropped in price by like 80%.

Not sure if I’m being clear enough here: the opening of free market conditions around insulin led to it becoming cheap enough to allow people to live.

Whatever was keeping insulin so expensive before that, it definitely wasn’t the free market.

There are literal wars being fought and people being shot for economic gains.

Right. That’s bad. Not very capitalist though, given capitalism is defined by free markets, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. Those are the alternative to shooting people for their stuff, if you didn’t know that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Before anyone wastes their time replying with links and facts, which you'll choose to ignore for some philosophical principle, what's the general point you're trying to make here? So far you're a cosplay mountain man who blames consumers for their stupidity/gullibility and praises Wal-mart (guessing libertarian? /s). It might be more useful to debate the viewpoint, you're looking at the same world and coming to different conclusions.