@ambrooks said in #51:
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@Cedur216 I see you are from Ukraine. You folks just recently escaped Communism - many of you don't understand how the free market works.
Sure, 32 years 7 months 29 days ago is "just recently". Could you be more condescending, please?
> Go see the movie "Wall Street". Gordon Gecko says - "Greed is good !". He is right ! When you make a shoe, you want to sell it at a good profit. That is greedy. You make a good shoe, so people will buy it. People want a good shoe, they are greedy for a good shoe. Everybody is greedy, everybody gets what they want - the world becomes a better place.
For you maybe. And that might be all you care about. But one doesn't need to belong to the class of 1965 who took Economics 101 in order to see how woefully simplistic this view of the world is.
Suppose you want to make the most profit possible (maximum greed). But shoemakers and seamsters need to be payed a living wage in your country. So rationally – in full accordance with your goal of maximising your profit – you move your production overseas (killing jobs at home). There you can open sweatshops without having to worry about many rules and regulations, without caring for worker health or benefits, without caring about fire protection, building codes, building maintenance, earthquake engineering ...
There you can produce at a MUCH lower cost, far offsetting the additional shipping costs, because you can get away with paying people starvation wages, make use of child labour and wage slavery. Well hidden in an opaque network of local contractors and subcontractors who you can easily blame (and move on to the next one) when one of your sweatshops is exposed by investigative journalism or burns 500 people alive due to inadequate fire protection or simply spontaneously collapses (burying hundreds) due to shoddy (earthquake) engineering. That's not your fault, that's THAT country's fault, that's THAT subcontractor's fault, nothing to see here.
Surely your people's desire to have good/cool/fashionable shoes (every other month) is more important than a few disposable lives.
So here's an example of how greed doesn't make the world a better place for everyone. It only makes the world better for you (impersonal you, meaning the shoe manufacturer in the above example). And the few beneficiaries of the economic system. It can make it a living hell (or mean death) for people you don't seem to care about – or more charitably are woefully unaware of.
And I haven't even started about the environmental disaster that is the (fast) fashion industry. Even IF you don't believe that the roughly 3 BILLION tons of carbon dioxide (about 8% of all global emissions) added to the atmosphere each year by the fashion industry alone are very harmful (which they are, because they drive anthropogenic climate change, as all available data indicates), you still have to tell me in what way "92 million tonnes of waste produced per year and 79 trillion litres of water consumed" (
www.nature.com/articles/s43017-020-0039-9) are nothing to worry about and actually make the world a better place. Because as you tell us we are rightfully greedy to own more clothes than we can ever wear or need and to throw them out months after we first bought them.
But again, you (presumably) do not live in a place that experiences water scarcity (yet) and you don't have your drinking water poisoned by landfills or your lungs filled with particulate matter from garbage incineration. So you don't appear to care. Or you don't know. You think greed makes the world a better place for everyone.
No. It doesn't. It benefits those who are greedy and voracious. It harms everyone else, especially the most vulnerable. The poor and the unborn (future generations have to pay the price for the destruction of the natural world, will die in more frequent extreme weather events, etc.). You might not be/feel personally affected, but please don't pontificate on others.
> Greed works for all of us ! Adam Smith discovered this in the 18th century. Read the book !
Does it? Does it really?