I’m so tired of people thinking these “benefits” are a solution to the problems we have today. At best they ease things temporarily for those that receive it, while continuing to allow the grocery corporations to pad their profits by charging way too much. We either need regulation about how much profit can be taken on food (at least on a large list of the types of foods people should be buying), or the addition of significant competition within the space and a complete ban on acquisitions within the sector.
True, if a person has been shot, you have to go after the person with the gun to prevent them from doing it again. But I’d also like the person who got shot to get immediate medical aid.
This is just one of the effects of late stage capitalism in a first world country! Any suggestion other than move from a capitalist society is like treating cancer with rubbing alcohol!
Market has always existed before capitalism! We are lead to believe the market would exist if not in a capitalist society! I just recently joined the mailing list from https://marxist.ca/ to know more! I’m not part of the group but reading the resources can guide you to overcome the myths and lies about socialism and communism!
There isn’t any easy fix to something complex as our current socioeconomic arrangement, however we should point out the root cause of our current affairs is due to the nature of capitalism!
I’m not about to join a mailing list, but I don’t like using the term “capitalism” for this exact reason. Depending on exact definition I could be pro or anti capitalism, or anywhere in between.
Sometimes people mean “markets” when they say capitalism. Sometimes they mean the existence of really high wealth inequality. Sometimes they’re using Marx’s original definition about the means of production.
In the first case, I see no alternatives, and so am for it. In the second case, I’m against it. The third requires more discussion about how ownership should be structured, and which things count as means of production before I can even decide. Using a term that could be any of them just leads to confusion.
Have you ever heard of Technocracy? It was designed specifically to do this, to provide every citizen with the highest possible standard of living without the gross inefficiencies of money based economies, to take advantage of technological automation to increase production and reduce work needed without reducing the standard of living by breaking the tie between income and labor. And it’s a pretty detailed idea too.
I’ve heard of the general “philosopher king”-type idea, but that website is using it differently. I’ll go over it, but it wants a state of post-scarcity before their idea applies, which we of course don’t have.
Actually in North America we could have had a working post-scarcity since the 1930s. It is why we had the Great Depression and what Technocracy was designed to be able to handle. It’s only been our continued use of a scarcity-based economic system that has been holding back our productive capacity with extreme inefficiencies.
Not sure where you are getting the philosopher king thing from?
Actually in North America we could have had a working post-scarcity since the 1930s.
How does that work? There almost wasn’t enough food to go around in the great depression, and plastic was an advanced new material hard to come by from the 40’s through the 60’s. Electronics took a long time to be produced in any significant quantity too. And what about land?
Not sure where you are getting the philosopher king thing from?
Plato said everything would be great if we had the smartest people in charge. He called it the philosopher king, others call it technocracy. In ancient Greece I probably would have thought it makes good sense.
In practice, thousands of years on, I think history has shown that there were always smart people and good ideas around; the shortage was of incentive for those with power to implement them, instead of just entrenching and enriching themselves.
How does that work? There almost wasn’t enough food to go around in the great depression,
Oh there was plenty of food to go around, the problem was that the system couldn’t make it “go around”. Either people were too poor to be able to afford it (all the unemployment back then) or companies couldn’t sell it for enough to stay in business. That was the problem: we were suddenly able to produce so much that the prices fell too low (in conjunction with decreased demand due to lower purchasing power) to sell it. This was precisely the problem Technocracy was developed to address. An economic system based on scarcity cannot distribute an abundance of goods and services, so either you use a system designed to actually do that (Technocracy), or you get rid of the abundance and keep the old system. Guess which we did. So crops were burned, livestock slaughtered, even weird stuff like pouring oil on oranges so no one could eat them. Get rid of the abundance, and prices go back up. Then we pumped money into the system so that people could afford to buy that scarcity again with the New Deal, subsidies to farmers, and good ol’ WWII helped a lot too.
and plastic was an advanced new material hard to come by from the 40’s through the 60’s. Electronics took a long time to be produced in any significant quantity too. And what about land?
I’m not talking about an abundance of every little thing, but rather what essentially gives a high standard of living: food, shelter, transportation, etc. We could have given everyone on the continent a much better life than was typical for the day. We have enough natural resources and technology to do that (although that won’t remain true forever).
Plato said everything would be great if we had the smartest people in charge. He called it the philosopher king, others call it technocracy.
Ah I see. Yeah, the term “technocracy” does get used to describe different things. What I’m talking about is a very specific proposal developed in the 1920s to address the problems of high production in a scarcity economy.
Well, if you’re talking about just food, shelter, and some very basic kind of transportation (no planes!), sure, there’s no scarcity. That’s a very low bar, though, and most people don’t want to live at the subsistence level.
Can you link to the original proposal, so I know what we’re talking about?
I’ve been thinking about this for a long while. Germany and South Korea would be the easiest countries to implement this change to technocracy for their population understanding science and change adaption.
Unfortunately I can’t confirm this statement for Germany. We may have a fairly high general standard of education and are generally regarded as a high-tech nation, but change is still met with great resistance. In my opinion, this is reflected for example in the fact that administrative and business processes are still very insufficiently digitalized. In addition, conservative and even openly fascist forces are currently gaining a lot of ground in the political landscape - with very similar strategies and rhetoric to those in the USA. Although this probably has a lot to do with the dissatisfaction of many citizens with the performance of the established political parties, the conclusion that many citizens draw from this is unfortunately generally more of a backward-looking way of thinking that does not care much for actual solutions. Unfortunately, it is foreseeable that the AfD, an openly fascist party, will get a lot of votes in the next election. This party is quite comparable to the US conservatives of these days: it hides its autocratic and very much neoliberal orientation behind crude accusations against immigrants and paints itself as the savior of “Germanness” (whatever that is supposed to mean) - but it offers no concrete solutions whatsoever; only polemics and hatred. So unfortunately, I do not currently see any potential for significant changes to the existing system or even a departure from excessive capitalism in Germany.
Because there is no answer. All systems are corruptable and capitalism at least puts that corruption out in the open. I’d argue the problem is that government stopped giving a shit about its civilians instead choosing to trust in the market to solve all problems which we are learning that is not the case.
Things will not start changing until government grows a pair and starts doing what it’s supposed to do.
Actually Canada is the closest it has ever come to getting UBI, as there are two bills (C-223 and S-233) being reviewed for it right now. It still is going to need a lot of support though, so head over to https://www.ubiworks.ca/guaranteed-livable-basic-income to sign the petition, learn more about these bills, and otherwise tell everyone you can, and we might have a chance!
We need to break up the grocery conglomerates. Nowhere else in the world is the food system so heavily monopolized and vertically integrated. Go tell an American about Cara Foods/Recipe Unltd[1] — they won’t believe you!
Food banks are privately organised and staffed by volunteers.
They’re a patch that tries to barely cover the gaping hole in tax-funded welfare for the citizens.
Crown corp would be great but letting them monopolize the entire process might not be the optimal thing to do. In some cases it worked well (e.g. hydro-quebec prices are very competitive) but in others it gives them unlimited power to set the prices as they want in order to achieve a target profit, with potentially murky decisions like automatic bonuses and millions in severance payments.
Oth crown corps competing in the market allows it to be more efficient since other players cannot push crown corps out of the market through acquisition, yet crown corps have to adapt their practice to be competitive and lean; good example is CDPQ infra participating in a competitive market when building light rail systems across Canada/UK.
Crown corporations can be non profit, that’s what the SAAQ is and it’s the reason why it’s so cheap to get insurance as a driver in Quebec compared to Ontario for example.
Singapore was able to moderate the price of groceries by opening a government owned grocery store chain called FairPrice in the 70s. This forced all the other stores to actually compete on price. Nowadays grocery stores match or beat FairPrice on cost and (shocker) are still profitable.
It wouldn’t solve the production issue though. We shouldn’t have to rely on foreigners to grow our food locally but people won’t work in that field unless salaries and conditions make sense and that won’t happen unless it’s nationalized or profits are distributed in a more fair way…
This is my answer to pretty much everything. Create a consistent baseline both in terms of consumer services/pricing and for employee work environment/compensation. Then let private industry compete with that crown corp. perfect example, the state of telecommunication services in Sask. Sasktel offers cell, internet and cable TV services while private companies compete along side them. The private companies have to actually be competitive(or at least convince customers that they are) with Sasktel if they want to capture any significant market share. They’re also competing with Sasktel to hire employees into similar roles, so they have to provide competitive wages and work environments. Prices in Sask tend to be lower than elsewhere due to Sasktel’s presence.
I don’t see what we wouldn’t have similar results in other industries, as long as the government actually allows it to happen and doesn’t just sell off the crowns to create a short term budget surplus or reward their buddies in competing private industries.
Unfortunately that doesnt do anything. Non-profits are just as bad as for-profits under the system we have. Nationalization or bust. Obviously nationalization doesn’t mean the federal government is in charge that still can mean that it’s locally operated and run.
Seriously. Even my dad who has a seemingly near-religious belief in capitalism (hello from 'murica) thinks that nationalizing food production wouldn’t be unreasonable.
(I don’t think my dad is as much of a capitalist as he thinks he is, but don’t even think about using the scary S word around him. He’ll try to find any excuse to say that capitalism is better than socialism. I don’t think he really understands what socialism is, but he’s not really interested in learning either so I just avoid using the term when talking to him. *shrug*).
A “Groceries and Essentials Benefit” is basically a wage subsidy, and you can bet the grocery chains would raise prices by just a little less than the benefit, and if it’s like food stamps in the US, it’ll be chipped away at and rendered humiliating and useless.
We’ve seen this play out with gas tax reductions: resellers know a lot about price elasticity, and any savings from a tax cut gets quickly eaten up by price increases.
Here’s what we could do:
Tax the rich until we can afford to pay for services again
Raise marginal and corporate rates, forcing companies to re-invest instead of hoarding profits
Make stock buybacks illegal
Significantly raise capital gains taxes
(this is tricky) find a way to tax net worth as income
Doesn’t that suggest they’d get more market share by having worse quality, somehow?
Companies do all those things, and not always for good reason, but let’s get our econ 101 ducks in a row a bit. I don’t think it’s because of competition for buyers.
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I’m so tired of people thinking these “benefits” are a solution to the problems we have today. At best they ease things temporarily for those that receive it, while continuing to allow the grocery corporations to pad their profits by charging way too much. We either need regulation about how much profit can be taken on food (at least on a large list of the types of foods people should be buying), or the addition of significant competition within the space and a complete ban on acquisitions within the sector.
True, if a person has been shot, you have to go after the person with the gun to prevent them from doing it again. But I’d also like the person who got shot to get immediate medical aid.
This is just one of the effects of late stage capitalism in a first world country! Any suggestion other than move from a capitalist society is like treating cancer with rubbing alcohol!
Okay. In detail, how do you manage complex, shifting supply chains without some kind of market?
Like, I’m also team eat the rich, but nobody can ever answer this.
Market has always existed before capitalism! We are lead to believe the market would exist if not in a capitalist society! I just recently joined the mailing list from https://marxist.ca/ to know more! I’m not part of the group but reading the resources can guide you to overcome the myths and lies about socialism and communism!
There isn’t any easy fix to something complex as our current socioeconomic arrangement, however we should point out the root cause of our current affairs is due to the nature of capitalism!
I’m not about to join a mailing list, but I don’t like using the term “capitalism” for this exact reason. Depending on exact definition I could be pro or anti capitalism, or anywhere in between.
So you don’t like the term capitalism, what is the synonym you use instead?
Do you think our society doesn’t live under the capitalism system or the fact the problem is the capitalism it doesn’t go well with you?
By the way I’m not judging you by any means, I just want to understand your point of view!
Sometimes people mean “markets” when they say capitalism. Sometimes they mean the existence of really high wealth inequality. Sometimes they’re using Marx’s original definition about the means of production.
In the first case, I see no alternatives, and so am for it. In the second case, I’m against it. The third requires more discussion about how ownership should be structured, and which things count as means of production before I can even decide. Using a term that could be any of them just leads to confusion.
Have you ever heard of Technocracy? It was designed specifically to do this, to provide every citizen with the highest possible standard of living without the gross inefficiencies of money based economies, to take advantage of technological automation to increase production and reduce work needed without reducing the standard of living by breaking the tie between income and labor. And it’s a pretty detailed idea too.
I’ve heard of the general “philosopher king”-type idea, but that website is using it differently. I’ll go over it, but it wants a state of post-scarcity before their idea applies, which we of course don’t have.
Actually in North America we could have had a working post-scarcity since the 1930s. It is why we had the Great Depression and what Technocracy was designed to be able to handle. It’s only been our continued use of a scarcity-based economic system that has been holding back our productive capacity with extreme inefficiencies.
Not sure where you are getting the philosopher king thing from?
How does that work? There almost wasn’t enough food to go around in the great depression, and plastic was an advanced new material hard to come by from the 40’s through the 60’s. Electronics took a long time to be produced in any significant quantity too. And what about land?
Plato said everything would be great if we had the smartest people in charge. He called it the philosopher king, others call it technocracy. In ancient Greece I probably would have thought it makes good sense.
In practice, thousands of years on, I think history has shown that there were always smart people and good ideas around; the shortage was of incentive for those with power to implement them, instead of just entrenching and enriching themselves.
Oh there was plenty of food to go around, the problem was that the system couldn’t make it “go around”. Either people were too poor to be able to afford it (all the unemployment back then) or companies couldn’t sell it for enough to stay in business. That was the problem: we were suddenly able to produce so much that the prices fell too low (in conjunction with decreased demand due to lower purchasing power) to sell it. This was precisely the problem Technocracy was developed to address. An economic system based on scarcity cannot distribute an abundance of goods and services, so either you use a system designed to actually do that (Technocracy), or you get rid of the abundance and keep the old system. Guess which we did. So crops were burned, livestock slaughtered, even weird stuff like pouring oil on oranges so no one could eat them. Get rid of the abundance, and prices go back up. Then we pumped money into the system so that people could afford to buy that scarcity again with the New Deal, subsidies to farmers, and good ol’ WWII helped a lot too.
I’m not talking about an abundance of every little thing, but rather what essentially gives a high standard of living: food, shelter, transportation, etc. We could have given everyone on the continent a much better life than was typical for the day. We have enough natural resources and technology to do that (although that won’t remain true forever).
Ah I see. Yeah, the term “technocracy” does get used to describe different things. What I’m talking about is a very specific proposal developed in the 1920s to address the problems of high production in a scarcity economy.
Well, if you’re talking about just food, shelter, and some very basic kind of transportation (no planes!), sure, there’s no scarcity. That’s a very low bar, though, and most people don’t want to live at the subsistence level.
Can you link to the original proposal, so I know what we’re talking about?
I’ve been thinking about this for a long while. Germany and South Korea would be the easiest countries to implement this change to technocracy for their population understanding science and change adaption.
Unfortunately I can’t confirm this statement for Germany. We may have a fairly high general standard of education and are generally regarded as a high-tech nation, but change is still met with great resistance. In my opinion, this is reflected for example in the fact that administrative and business processes are still very insufficiently digitalized. In addition, conservative and even openly fascist forces are currently gaining a lot of ground in the political landscape - with very similar strategies and rhetoric to those in the USA. Although this probably has a lot to do with the dissatisfaction of many citizens with the performance of the established political parties, the conclusion that many citizens draw from this is unfortunately generally more of a backward-looking way of thinking that does not care much for actual solutions. Unfortunately, it is foreseeable that the AfD, an openly fascist party, will get a lot of votes in the next election. This party is quite comparable to the US conservatives of these days: it hides its autocratic and very much neoliberal orientation behind crude accusations against immigrants and paints itself as the savior of “Germanness” (whatever that is supposed to mean) - but it offers no concrete solutions whatsoever; only polemics and hatred. So unfortunately, I do not currently see any potential for significant changes to the existing system or even a departure from excessive capitalism in Germany.
Because there is no answer. All systems are corruptable and capitalism at least puts that corruption out in the open. I’d argue the problem is that government stopped giving a shit about its civilians instead choosing to trust in the market to solve all problems which we are learning that is not the case.
Things will not start changing until government grows a pair and starts doing what it’s supposed to do.
They did pass a new competition act at the start of this year. Hopefully it starts biting soon, like before 2026.
Did someone say UBI? UBI. UBI, FFS!
Actually Canada is the closest it has ever come to getting UBI, as there are two bills (C-223 and S-233) being reviewed for it right now. It still is going to need a lot of support though, so head over to https://www.ubiworks.ca/guaranteed-livable-basic-income to sign the petition, learn more about these bills, and otherwise tell everyone you can, and we might have a chance!
Yeah. Patchwork benefits are ass to navigate. Like, almost dehumanising.
We need to break up the grocery conglomerates. Nowhere else in the world is the food system so heavily monopolized and vertically integrated. Go tell an American about Cara Foods/Recipe Unltd[1] — they won’t believe you!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recipe_Unlimited
They operate a bunch of mediocre chain restaurants, not grocery stores - unless I’m missing something?
Is it?
Isn’t the goal is to have 100% of people fed by food banks? The complete abolition of commoditized foods?
Food banks are privately organised and staffed by volunteers.
They’re a patch that tries to barely cover the gaping hole in tax-funded welfare for the citizens.
Yeah, they should be funded by tax dollars.
Repeat after me
Nationalize
The
Food
Chain
Farmers don’t make enough to pay employees, groceries make too much for it to make sense, fuck that shit, crown corporation to run the whole thing.
Crown corp would be great but letting them monopolize the entire process might not be the optimal thing to do. In some cases it worked well (e.g. hydro-quebec prices are very competitive) but in others it gives them unlimited power to set the prices as they want in order to achieve a target profit, with potentially murky decisions like automatic bonuses and millions in severance payments.
Oth crown corps competing in the market allows it to be more efficient since other players cannot push crown corps out of the market through acquisition, yet crown corps have to adapt their practice to be competitive and lean; good example is CDPQ infra participating in a competitive market when building light rail systems across Canada/UK.
Crown corporations can be non profit, that’s what the SAAQ is and it’s the reason why it’s so cheap to get insurance as a driver in Quebec compared to Ontario for example.
Singapore was able to moderate the price of groceries by opening a government owned grocery store chain called FairPrice in the 70s. This forced all the other stores to actually compete on price. Nowadays grocery stores match or beat FairPrice on cost and (shocker) are still profitable.
It wouldn’t solve the production issue though. We shouldn’t have to rely on foreigners to grow our food locally but people won’t work in that field unless salaries and conditions make sense and that won’t happen unless it’s nationalized or profits are distributed in a more fair way…
Another idea:
Make the entire food sector non-profit.
Non-profit crown corporation! Same for rental housing!
This is my answer to pretty much everything. Create a consistent baseline both in terms of consumer services/pricing and for employee work environment/compensation. Then let private industry compete with that crown corp. perfect example, the state of telecommunication services in Sask. Sasktel offers cell, internet and cable TV services while private companies compete along side them. The private companies have to actually be competitive(or at least convince customers that they are) with Sasktel if they want to capture any significant market share. They’re also competing with Sasktel to hire employees into similar roles, so they have to provide competitive wages and work environments. Prices in Sask tend to be lower than elsewhere due to Sasktel’s presence.
I don’t see what we wouldn’t have similar results in other industries, as long as the government actually allows it to happen and doesn’t just sell off the crowns to create a short term budget surplus or reward their buddies in competing private industries.
Unfortunately that doesnt do anything. Non-profits are just as bad as for-profits under the system we have. Nationalization or bust. Obviously nationalization doesn’t mean the federal government is in charge that still can mean that it’s locally operated and run.
Seriously. Even my dad who has a seemingly near-religious belief in capitalism (hello from 'murica) thinks that nationalizing food production wouldn’t be unreasonable.
(I don’t think my dad is as much of a capitalist as he thinks he is, but don’t even think about using the scary S word around him. He’ll try to find any excuse to say that capitalism is better than socialism. I don’t think he really understands what socialism is, but he’s not really interested in learning either so I just avoid using the term when talking to him. *shrug*).
A “Groceries and Essentials Benefit” is basically a wage subsidy, and you can bet the grocery chains would raise prices by just a little less than the benefit, and if it’s like food stamps in the US, it’ll be chipped away at and rendered humiliating and useless.
We’ve seen this play out with gas tax reductions: resellers know a lot about price elasticity, and any savings from a tax cut gets quickly eaten up by price increases.
Here’s what we could do:
I mean, if we had actual competition they’d be forced to pull their prices right back down again competing with each other.
Lowering prices is only one possible outcome of competition though. So is lower product quality, and laying off workers. In general, cutting costs.
Doesn’t that suggest they’d get more market share by having worse quality, somehow?
Companies do all those things, and not always for good reason, but let’s get our econ 101 ducks in a row a bit. I don’t think it’s because of competition for buyers.