Resources are expensive, so the fewer you need to produce a good, the cheaper the good. Thus capitalism naturally strives to use as little as possible.

Efficiency here is more dollars out per dollar put in, but because resources such as land, raw goods, time, and labor (especially unpleasant labor, since it costs more) all cost money, it ends up pushing for using as little as those as possible.

There's another positive outcomes of this drive toward efficiency as well though, it encourages recycling. Garbage is an extremely cheap resource, since not many people want it, and if you can figure out a way to utilize it, you're making a product from very cheap resources, and can make a cheap product.

In one episode of Community, the study group took over the supply of deep-fried chicken (in a mafia movie parody), and Abed was in charge of distributing it to the rest of the school. When told to stop, and that the mafia movie was over, he replied "I'm not doing a mafia movie. In fact, I don't need movies or tv shows to talk to people anymore. Before I only needed them because the day to day world made no sense to me, but now everyone's speaking the same language, chicken. I understand people, and they finally understand me."

Everyone has different terminal goals. Some people want to cure cancer, some want to win a race, some want to eat spaghetti, and some want to meet new people. This should make it very difficult for two people to interact and exchange goods or services, since they want different things and have no way of knowing what the other wants (short of directly asking). However, in capitalism, everyone shares one convergent instrumental goal, money.

Completing your termin

It's good to want workers to be paid more, better working conditions, cheaper medications, affordable housing. Those are all important and it's very hard to go without them.

However, government intervention is not a good way to deliver these. Price controls are a good example of this.

The market forces incentivizing people to provide goods, services, or employment dictate the price, and directly interfering with that price greatly effects the incentive to provide it.

This can be seen on supply and demand charts. In the case of a price ceiling, there is a much higher demand at that price (since people exceedingly find the low cost to be worth it), but a much lower supply at that price (since it's much more challenging to sell at a profit). The result is a shortage. In the case of a price floor, there is much more supply, but there's much less demand since no one can afford it, it is as though there is a shortage.

Price ceilings cause either shortages, low quality products, or both.

Since there's so little pro-capitalism sentiment on the fediverse (or maybe it's just lemmy, in either case I couldn't find much) I'd like to start posting some arguments for capitalism. I'm not an expert, so I don't know that what I'm saying matches what a capitalist who knows what he's talking about might say. Let me know if I'm way off please.

One of the basic ideas behind capitalism is competition. There are multiple companies competing for your money. It is of vital importance for each of them that they collect more consumer dollars than they spend. This ensures that they are making a profit and can keep growing their business.

To ensure that one company gets your business over another, the company will produce the highest quality product for the lowest price. They'll desperately explore how best to make a particular product, what products consumers want, the best ways to deliver that product to the consumer, and the lowest price they can sell that item for while staying in busi

Capitalism looks good on paper but it doesn’t work in real life. It’s just human nature. These academics talk about supply and demand curves, but after hundreds of years they still can’t even provide evidence that one exists. I’d love it if markets were free and efficient. It would make society so simple and everyone would get what they needed most. But people aren’t robots, you know? They don’t consume rationally and all the money ends up going to the guys at the top who use it to make themselves more powerful. It’s called tragedy of the commons. Markets can start out efficient, but people steal shit and force people to stop competing, which fucks the markets up even more.

Can I be fired for wearing something the boss does not like?

I want to start by promoting a discussion about employment at-will in the United States.

Employment at-will is a concept I had a hard time with in my 20s. I now see that it is a vital characteristic of a successful society. If your boss hates the color blue and you wear a blue shirt, you can be fired. You might think this is insanity - but you have the same rights. If you think his red shirt is nasty, you can march right up to him and quit.

Employment at-will is the mechanism that self regulates your salary. You present an employer your skills and merits and they decide how much they are worth. If you have enough of these things you will not be fired because you are valuable and finding valuable people is hard. If you are not compensated enough it is your will to find more profitable employment.

There seems to be some strange idea that employers are members of some sort of elite patriarchy and the people they h

I am shocked to see how many anti-capitalist's there are these days. Capitalism is quite frankly the great western experiment that has historically been proven to promote technological and social progress through the understanding that hard work and freedom to communicate ideas brings success. The opposite would be forced ideology and mandated work schedules - this has historically brought famine, genocide and mass technological decline.

Let's keep it clean and post a single question per post so it can be more easily digested.