I imagine if you had a lot of competition, prices might stay lower. But the reality is that monopolies or cartels or whatever will form
Comment on Denver basic income reduces homelessness, food insecurity
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 4 months agoYou’re not wrong, no. Price controls are ABSOLUTELY necessary. Even without basic income, but of course especially with.
Corporations have demonstrated time and time again that they’ll profiteer as much as they’re allowed to.
In recent years, they’ve even stopped caring about whether people are able to afford their prices.
They cynically but correctly assume that people will spend more money than they have when the alternative is them and their families starving on the street.
Corporations are getting increasingly brazen about not valuing the lives and well-being of their customers anywhere near as highly as short term profits, and the vast majority of politicians are as spineless in regulating their own owners as always, if not even worse than they have been since almost a century ago.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 4 months ago
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yeah, that’s how under-regulated markets inevitably work: someone who has no incentive to prioritize fairness or the common good accumulate too much power and use that power to gain more power etc until only the most powerful remain and everyone else, especially consumers, suffer immensely.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 4 months ago
Thats why the government issued rations stamps during the depression. That way food aid actually helped people instead of just linning the pockets of grocers. But the past 40 years of neoliberal deregulation has made that an absolute non-starter and most people dont even know how much the government used to regulate and manage everything.