Price controls

What are leftypols thoughts on price control?
I think they're counter productive.

Attached: Toilet_paper.jpg (3000x2000, 1.31M)

Other urls found in this thread:

lanacion.com.ar/1584655-el-gobierno-venezolano-justifico-la-escasez-de-papel-higienico-la-gente-esta-comiendo-mas
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Rationing is better

Like all methods of trying to 'regulate' or 'moderate' capitalism it fails and leads to crisis all the same. The internal contradictions of capitalism are inextricable from it and you can't stop crisis without a total abolition of private property.

Attached: he sees the dialectic.png (750x500, 820.97K)

How about labor vouchers instead?

EVER THUNK OF THAT?

The shortage of toilet paper in muh vuvuzela is due to the fact that the company that produces it waging economic warfare on the government. If the PSUV is overthrown, expect a Chile-like situation where all the “shortages” are over and toilet paper is back on the shelves the next fucking day.

The company is waging economic warfare in reaction to price controls.

Capitalist economics is basically a fucking hostage situation.

It’s not in reaction to price controls, the Venezuelan bourgeoisie smelled blood in the water after the crash in oil prices lead to an economic crisis in Venezuela. They, the “opposition” and their imperialist backers in the US have been actively attempting to overthrow the PSUV government and set up some military junta or American occupation. The PSUV could roll back the price controls and they’d still be doing this.

Agree

From what I read by people like Paul Cockshot. Price control, and small prices lead to everyone being able to afford food, long breadlines and empty shelves. Luckily previous generations gave us the tools to overcome such problems. Vertical farming was first used in socialist Armenia, industrial and education advancements can lead into mass production of necessary for farming gear like tractors and China is biggest investor into lab meat. So in my opinion rather than controlling prices government should invest into maximizing agricultural production, vertical farms and lab grown meat. When production is high and there is surplussed prices will be low by default.

Attached: China lab grown meat.jpg (720x514 1.12 MB, 112.72K)

This

Price controls generally dont work that well, due to reasons posted in this reply.

Though most capitalist countries do use some form of price controls even if it is not directly e.g. united states massive farming subsidies creating artificially low cost. One place where price controls work well and should be policy of socialist parties is rent control. But it has to be done alongside policies of forcing sale to the public of commercial properties that lay empty for so much amount of time or have been neglected by the landlord as well as building public housing.

Would imposing rationing be a good idea in that situation? The rations could be quite generous and still prevent breadlines/empty shelves. I don't understand why socialist Poland kept having the problem you describe without using rationing.

If Venezuelans are starving why do they need so much toilet paper?

So what happened to the nationalized toilet paper company? Did they start producing? Just guess.

This argument has been used, unironically, by the Venezuelan government before: lanacion.com.ar/1584655-el-gobierno-venezolano-justifico-la-escasez-de-papel-higienico-la-gente-esta-comiendo-mas

Top fucking kek.

what nationalized toilet paper company?

They expropriated a Kimberly-Clark factory.

Depends. If there is a monopoly or cartel making very high profits AND the price controls won't depress the profits so much (below average) that they would rather produce something else AND the product is simple enough to define so that price controls can't be circumvented by changing the product to something inferior, then it can work. But you have to keep in mind that what capitalists want is power, and while profits have a lot to do with that, these concepts are not identical, and they will do things that are stupid from a strict profit-maximizing point of view when they see their political clout threatened.

A thing is not expensive simply because of its price being at this or that number, something is only expensive relative to someone's budget. So, making it less expensive can mean to lower the price or to increase the budget of people for whom it is expensive or a combination of these two. Applied to durable products that can easily change hands, a policy of prices that are very low (or even zero) in combination with a per-person limit likely leads to many taking everything they can get in order to trade. The policy can work for services and things consumed on the spot, but even then the question remains: Why not just ensure that people have enough budget?

As an anti-inflation measure, direct price controls are excessive. What matters is the price of a basket of products and services, and for that it is enough to fix the sum of prices of what makes up the basket, which can be done by a mechanism equivalent to having an aggregate pollution limit and players having allocated pollution rights they can trade with each other.

Price controls for a currency's exchange rate don't work.

You need more than just a factory. They might have been able to produce with whatever stock was already at the factory, but unless they nationalized the whole logistics chain, that's all they would have been able to produce.

If a black market exists, then your price controls don't work.