I guarantee this person says "basic economics" at least 5 times a day :ancap-good:

  • LibsEatPoop3 [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    The post is cringe obviously but I’m even more appalled by the brain dead 300+ People who liked it.

    A serious response - the worker says it’ll take them an hour to make the chair which they value at $20. So you pay that. They require wood, which the logger says will take them an hour which they value at $20. You say it’ll take you an hour to get the materials to and fro and make the sale - which you value at $20. So you sell the chair for $60 dollars and pay the two workers their share.

    Why not sell the chair for $70 and keep the extra $10? Because you valued your work as being $20 as did the other two workers. Which means the true cost is $60. You can charge even $100 if you want, but if the true cost is $60, then there will be other sellers selling it for that price, thereby driving you out of business.

    Unless you have a monopoly on the wood and you pay $20 to a cop to protect the woods and only allow your logger to cut the trees. In that case the true cost is $80 and by charging $100 you get to keep $40.

    But why stop there? If only you have the tree supply then your logger and chair-maker can only be employed by you and no one else. You can just pay them $10 each, enough to buy food and water and nothing else, this decreasing the true cost to $60 and pocket $60.

    Maybe the other people you’ve driven out of business don’t like your monopoly and try to revolt. You have two options. Pay the cop $40 instead of $20 to prevent your competitors from bribing him. They, of course, don’t have that much cash so they can’t outpay him. Now your true cost for the chair rises to $80 and you keep only $40. That’s not good enough.

    But, also, the other sellers join together to overthrow your cop and take over your monopoly. So you have to buy some of them out. You pay some of them $20, which is what they were making before, to fight the others. True cost of the chair rises to $100 and you still only sell at $100 so you now only get $20. Not good enough. You make no extra profit. This is what you would’ve originally gotten if you’d just been honest. But now you only get this while doing much more work, suppressing your workers, reducing the number of chairs, and making everyone miserable. Good job.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The post is cringe obviously but I’m even more appalled by the brain dead 300+ People who liked it.

      I figure at least some of those are bots. There is a lot of money put into right-wing astroturfing.

      • Omega_Haxors [they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Occam's razor. They're probably just drones going along liking everything that appeals to them at the moment.

        Come on, admit it, we've all done this. Don't kid yourself. They save their bots for the 100k+ posts.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      This is what you would’ve originally gotten if you’d just been honest. But now you only get this while doing much more work, suppressing your workers, reducing the number of chairs, and making everyone miserable. Good job.

      Far easier to just employ cops directly and demand a fee for doing business in your territory. Then your costs drop substantially and all you really care about is the chair-making people generating enough surplus to pad your wallet. Spend a bit more and you can send your cops abroad, to seize lumber and extort labor from neighboring states. Install the existing chair makers as overseers who administer the bureaucratic chair-making state, pitting one against the other for the privilege of rank within the chair-o-cracy.

      Yes, things do seem a bit less efficient than if you'd played fairly. But now you're making $20/chair warehouse, and you're rapidly expanding the number of warehouses in your domain. Your objective is no longer to make chairs at the lowest per-unit price, but to increase the rate at which chairs are produced and sold relative to the economy as a whole.