Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mcphage 253 days ago
> 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.
1 comments
Freedom2 253 days ago
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?
link
mcphage 253 days ago
Maybe they forgot, maybe the banks wouldn’t extend them loans to open the stores.
link
Freedom2 252 days ago
If that's the case, why not pool together to open a competing bank according to their values?
link
mcphage 252 days ago
You mean a socialist credit union?
link
sbrocket 252 days ago
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.

link
mcphage 252 days ago
> 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.

link