Maybe some of the free benefits one gets from capitalism are similar in nature to what one gets from "sleeper democracy" like ours; anything sufficiently large scale will be noticed (if one supermarket charges 1.5 times what another does and doesn't offer some other benefit, like home delivery or being full of people of one's social class, people will consider it expensive and avoid it); anything close enough to being a wash will be less important than convenience and personal preference. Likewise, in a sleeper democracy, anyone proposing sufficiently nasty policy has to work harder to get it accepted.
There are always a few people who care more, who subscribe to Consumer Report, who clip coupons, etc, and some of them might even be overoptimising, but for most people there's a threshold.
Maybe there even should be a threshold, to prevent competition from making the provit margin too thin for sellers to be reasonably available. Remember the tension between Lassiez-Faire capitalism and Perfect-Competition capitalism; the latter, while a work of theory, is the one that is most easily argued to produce the economic benefits (the former is most easily argued for on terms of philosophy). In practice, we have neither, but both of them are useful abstractions in considering the many forms of capitalism and nearby mixed-systems.
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Date: 2011-11-06 02:23 am (UTC)There are always a few people who care more, who subscribe to Consumer Report, who clip coupons, etc, and some of them might even be overoptimising, but for most people there's a threshold.
Maybe there even should be a threshold, to prevent competition from making the provit margin too thin for sellers to be reasonably available. Remember the tension between Lassiez-Faire capitalism and Perfect-Competition capitalism; the latter, while a work of theory, is the one that is most easily argued to produce the economic benefits (the former is most easily argued for on terms of philosophy). In practice, we have neither, but both of them are useful abstractions in considering the many forms of capitalism and nearby mixed-systems.