[techblueberry]

I don’t love this argument and I think it comes down to - and maybe this is an elitist anti-populist argument or whatever but, like consequentially - one could say about Walmart that Walmart didn’t destroy small-town American main streets, consumer preferences did. And of course, this is loosely speaking true, but this is tangentially similar to “Fentanyl didn’t ruin small-town America, consumer preferences did.”

Like - consequentially, one can see that before Walmart there were more locally owned stores in small towns. And I think we can argue about whether or not people were happier then. I would guess most people, particularly younger people are just happy to have a place where they can buy more stuff cheaper.

But all those negative externalities still happened. We can still be mad about that; and I think to a certain extent, like fundamentally is our goal to optimize dopamine hacking at the cheapest possible price point? Is there ever an argument to be made that maybe we design a system that doesn’t entirely feed into this pattern? Antitrust law is almost entirely a set of laws that exist to stop the system just doing its thang. Anti-drug and anti-smoking laws as well. Should we stop praying to the altar of consumer preferences in more cases? especially in the growing metaverse/character ai/brain-computer interface era.

[mcphage]

> one could say about Walmart that Walmart didn’t destroy small-town American main streets, consumer preferences did

Except that’s not even true—Walmart doesn’t merely sell products, it does plenty of anticompetitive tactics itself, like opening a store in a town, waiting until smaller retailers nearby go out of business, then close that Walmart and open a new one in the next town over. People in the first town have no choice but to drive to the next town for products, since the local businesses are gone. Rinse and repeat.

[Freedom2]

Most American small towns lean libertarian and espouse rugged individualism - wouldn't they have just opened a competing business with competitive prices instead? Or did they forget how?

[mcphage]

Maybe they forgot, maybe the banks wouldn’t extend them loans to open the stores.

[Freedom2]

If that's the case, why not pool together to open a competing bank according to their values?

[mcphage]

You mean a socialist credit union?

[sbrocket]

It seems like you’re making the same faulty assumption that a lot of libertarians do, which is assuming that just because that is possible and perhaps even economically incentivized, it will happen automatically and immediately to meet demand. Libertarian analysis often just ignores the longer scale passage of time and that institutions - even small businesses, a kind of local institution - take time and human effort to create and maintain.

It all discards way too much of the real world complexity to human systems. Analyzing economic systems in only short (quarter/year) time scales without looking at how one quarter or year affects the ones around it is a massive assumption that I don’t think most people generally have nearly enough respect for.

[mcphage]

> It seems like you’re making the same faulty assumption that a lot of libertarians do, which is assuming that just because that is possible and perhaps even economically incentivized, it will happen automatically and immediately to meet demand.

I don’t think the person you’re replying to actually believes that—they’re speaking ironically.