The free market...that guarantees fair prices through competition...just like every morning when I came to work at QuikTrip years ago, part of my job was to shop the competition for gas prices so we could stay a penny low when possible as gas was a loss leader @ $0.97/gal.
And if there is any regulation...the fox news freaks walk straight out of church to through their arms in the air screaming communism and get all misty eyed for the good ol' days of McCarthyism.
I was thinking this morning in about the story that I have heard related many times as to why communism is so bad...and it probably is (it is a system...systems fail)...anyhow the story is something like this:
Two farmers. Each has a horse. One farmer takes very good care of his horse. He plans ahead and puts away enough hay and grain for the winter (probably has a good veterinary insurance policy also). The other farmer does not take good care of his horse and for whatever reason, his horse dies....Communism being all even-stevens...The horseless farmer goes to whoever is in charge, and says it is not fair that he has no horse when his "comrade" has such a fine animal...and demands that the equalizing force of communism provide him with a horse.
Well this is a western story...and it ends with the good horse being killed to make things equal.
This is highly fallacious. Now the systems of communism combined with greed, corruption and power have not been successful historically as we all at least believe. But maybe it was because things were never actually even...and huge amounts of money had to be spent on the defense of their very ideals...and pay attention here...10 years in Afghanistan.
In actuality there probably would be someone who was really good at breeding and raising horses. As a man can only ride one horse at a time...a collection of many horses ends up being a collection of wealth or more correctly power.
Now...this is not really that cool (WWJD?). The stableman probably gets his food from the farmer...the farmer gets his horse from the stableman...the food grows with a little help from the farmer and good weather...the horses fuck so much you have to keep them separated....So no the good horse would not have been shot...the dead horse would be buried.
The other thing on the brain this morning was how we convert work to dollars in exchange for goods and services.
Like an internal combustion engine...this conversion of work to dollars is highly inefficient as often as the work is converted, others take a small portion...like the loss to heat in an engine. Why should others benefit directly or indirectly from another persons labor?
And here is the thing. If you feel as though you are well compensated for your labor...it is likely that you are overpaid (or make money by screwing others) and part of the problem.