Xyz company is not your friend. Ok, like we didn’t know they are trying to make money off the other side? When is the last time a company trying to make a profit is our friend?
This viewpoint fails to consider the nontrivial competitive advantage gained by building customer loyalty. There are plenty of brands that do well despite higher prices, longer waits, etc due to their consistent positive interactions with customers; A culture of trust between customer and company is frequently worth the cost.
Amazon seems to have decided that the higher margins of counterfeits and prioritizing ads over search quality are worth the loss of user trust. I wholeheartedly hope this will be a costly miscalculation on their part, as I would prefer a marketplace with fewer ads and reliably genuine items.
I agree with you. Amazon's questionable inventory tactics have been a factor for me in deciding to sometimes shop elsewhere. Although, I don't mind the ads, they're selling screen space, I can happily scroll past them, the adds are often very relevant, and they are clearly marked sponsored.
Everybody "conspires to advance their own interests"... that's pretty much the definition of self-interest.
Anyway, the point is just that one doesn't expect companies to be your friend. You expect them to pursue their own interest, and thankfully their interest and your interest overlap quite often - and mutual, voluntary exchange of goods, service, and currency occurs.
Are there things I wish Amazon, for example, did differently? Of course. And the wonderful thing about the free market is that if enough of their customers become unhappy about some issue or other, another company can come along and serve those customers. Of course that might not happen, and that's fine. Nobody is claiming that a free market guarantees that everybody gets exactly what they want.
If a transaction weren't in my interest, I wouldn't engage in it. And value isn't being extracted when parties engage in voluntary trade, it's being created.
Note that this is not to say that I (or anybody else) engages in strict, robot-like, mathematical optimization of all transactions to ensure that our best interest is served down to the .00000000000001th place. We, as human beings, employ satisficing[1] for a lot of our decision making. But the fact that I buy from Amazon when I could save 50 cents by buying from Walmart instead, or that I tolerate Amazon showing me a few ads when I'm shopping, is neither here nor there.
If a transaction weren't in my interest, I wouldn't engage in it.
This is a fallacy. People often engage in transactions that aren't in their interest- believing in the moment that they are. Or said another way, there's a difference between long-term interest and short term interest, and people often don't see their long-term interest clearly. Or said still a different way, there's a big difference between happiness and pleasure, and people sometimes engage in pleasure in detriment to their happiness (roughly from the Dalai Lama).
I'm not talking about the 10^(-14). I'm talking about real decisions where there is an information asymmetry. And meth.
Fraud is not allowed in the 'free market.' Regulation need not apply, proper courts and remedy for fraud are required.
We used to live in a world where a retailer or manufacturer would stand behind their product and not let anyone sully their name. Since today's consumers seem to lack the ability to discriminate between 'cheap' and 'value' we are in the world we're in.
One particular retailer I'm fond of in this regard is Home Depot. If I have any problems with any of their merchandise, they take it back, no problem. They stand behind what they sell and I appreciate that.
No, courts are arbiters, sometimes of the law, sometimes of civil disputes, such as contracts.
> Laws defining and providing remedies for comemrcial frauds are regulations
That is true, laws that apply to contracts are regulations, however, they are not necessary for remedy.
If I have a contract to receive "A spoon product id xyz as created by Sir Porky Pig of 123. Main, CA USA" and anything other than that is delivered, it's a breach of contract at least and fraud at worst. I could sue for damages. What regulation is needed for this transaction? If someone were to deliberately intend to deceive me, that is fraud, and there are already laws for that.
> No, courts are arbiters, sometimes of the law, sometimes of civil disputes, such as contracts.
The things they define what is an enforceable contract and what remedies are available for violations are, again, laws. Civil law is as much law as criminal law.
> That is true, laws that apply to contracts are regulations, however, they are not necessary for remedy.
Yes, they are.
It is law which defines what is a contract, and law which defines what remedies exist for breach.
> If I have a contract to receive "A spoon product id xyz as created by Sir Porky Pig of 123. Main, CA USA" and anything other than that is delivered, it's a breach of contract at least and fraud at worst. I could sue for damages. What regulation is needed for this transaction?
(1) A law defining when an enforceable contract is formed and how the enforceable terms are determined.
(2) A law defining the parameters on which damages are legally compensable from breach, including setting standards for traceability of causation of the harm to the breach, degree to which the I hired party is or is not obligated to act reasonably to mitigate damages, etc.
> If someone were to deliberately intend to deceive me, that is fraud, and there are already laws for that.
you don't think people exchanging goods and services using money as an intermediate exchange (aka capitalism) can be a net-positive? Because any other aspect of our current formation of capitalism is negotiable. We can regulate to counteract negative corporate behaviours (though that has its own set of issues) so that companies are working for the benefit of the populace.
Yeah I know, but my point was that the market plus money is the indivisible unit of capitalism. You can take any other aspect away and it will still be capitalism. Unless you think some other fundamental characteristic is also required? I'm open to that idea. Private ownership of the means of production isn't really one because that existed during early market economies too.
Yes, private ownership is one condition, but not the only one. I'd add capital intensive production (building plants and machinery for automation), the existance of a labor market and the existance of a big class of people lacking ownership of the means of production, thereby being forced to sell their labor on the market. And you have a class of people living off of the profits generated by the means of production (in contrast to feudalism, where people also lived without working, but the means came from fiefs, not from the market).
throwing in all these requirements leaves you with a definition of capitalism that pretty tightly matches the system we have right now. This is my main issue with criticisms of capitalism - they (rightly) criticise the system we live with right now but instead of looking into individual rules, entities and interactions that cause the problems, we declare that (to quote the comment I objected to) "it's not clear [...] that one can have the baby without it spoiling the bathwater.". It's terribly reductionist to take a complex interlocking system and say "it's not working, we need to get rid of it!" because chances are that the problems could be fixed within the system itself.
Or in software terms, I think our current form of capitalism is in need of refactoring, not rejecting as fundamentally broken.
I don't think money is a nessesary ingredient of captialism (though it is immensely helpful). Money also exists in most forms of communism. Capitalism is more about private ownership of the means of productions, with different companies competing against each other on the market.
Monopolies run against the spirit of capitalism. Regulated markets on the other hand are fine as long as competition is ensured.
> Capitalism is more about private ownership of the means of productions
That existed before capitalism - in feudalism, for example. It's true in the context of Marxist analysis of capitalism as that's how Marx decided to frame capitalism, but it isn't capitalism's distinguishing feature.
> Monopolies run against the spirit of capitalism.
Effectively, yes, which is why we should prevent them by either public ownership of natural monopoly resources (public road ownership, for an example to wind up the libertarians) or regulation.
We are in a historical paradise for consumers of selection and low prices, I think we are doing alright. If Amazon doesn't deliver (pun intended) we will go somewhere else. There is no shortage of competition in the retail space.
