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by jack_h 311 days ago
Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Market economies, command economies, mercantile economies, and any other economic system must deal with these scarcities somehow. Even in the animal kingdom this must be contended with, albeit at a much lower level of abstraction. We deal with scarcity in a number of different ways, e.g. higher prices, waiting lines, by need, or some other metric or any combination thereof. Animals tend to deal with resource (food) scarcity through violence, abandonment, and a few other processes because not eating means death. That isn't to say cooperation doesn't happen, it absolutely does, but it is still constrained by resource scarcity.

> But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly

All economic systems are a set of trade-offs and capitalism in general tends to outperform all other economic systems we know of. That isn't to say it's a perfect system, it isn't, but I've noticed people who profess your opinion implicitly assume the alternative is a utopia that which simply does not exist. We may find a better system in the future but it will still be constrained by the law of supply and demand, resource scarcity, and human nature and hence will have trade-offs.