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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

COVID-19 is bringing to the surface more and more fascinating cases where under "normal" circumstances Capitalism and making a profit is a good thing, but under just a little bit of pressure, suddenly it's evil.

Canada have just made it illegal ($5000 fine) for trying to profit off sales of toilet paper or sanitizer, and listings for them have been banned from eBay and Kijiji (Canada's version of Craigslist). Of course, under normal circumstances it's perfectly fine for Nike to make a pair of shoes for $3 (paying people terrible wages) and then sell them for $300 dollars. Their share price goes up and the Capitalists are happy.

Under normal circumstances patents are a good way to protect IP, and nobody cared last month that a part was $11,000 dollars and they had a monopoly on making it.

As one twitter post said "COVID-19 is a blacklight and it's revealing a lot of nasty stains on our Capitalist society"

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Oh come on, "nobody cared last month"?

The problem is that there's lots of regulatory capture in the medical industry and that lots of people don't mind it so long as they get to elect people that say the things they want to hear. Plenty of people care, just not a voting majority.

Patents are government-granted monopolies. Hardly a free market. Same with land ownership, hence my Georgism.

I never understand these capitalism criticisms. It’s like criticizing modern medicine because Coronavirus exists. Yeah, it’s not a perfect system but I’m not going to switch to homeopathy just yet.

Your analogy makes no sense. Modern medicine didn't create, or even encourage the creation of, the coronavirus. Price gouging is very much an obvious consequence of unbridled capitalism.

That is fucking rich. You obviously never tried buying something in the USSR. Or when rationing was in effect during WW2. Or medicinal alcohol during prohibition. All government regulated supply resulting in a very expensive secondary market. Black markets thrive under systems other than capitalism where price gouging is the exception rather than the rule.

Yes you are right. Even with laws preventing price gouging people will sell/buy what they want. If sellers/buyers cannot do that in government regulated market - they will do that in the black markets

Please explain how I am wrong?

Price gouging is evidence of a failed market and not a consequence of capitalism. In the event of market failure, government intervention is often warranted until the market can correct itself.

However, laws against price gouging are not the whole solution.

Laws against price gouging do not prevent hoarding or panic buying. Thus, holding the price of the goods artificially low in the face of increased demand leads to shortages. (Unsurprisingly)

If you have laws against price gouging you need to have laws that limit the number of units purchased to reduce hoarding. Otherwise, you inevitably will have short term shortages.

Well, in fairness there are real problems, but they're not unsolvable ones nor reasons to abandon capitalism, we just need to fix the IP laws in various ways and make other tweaks.

The real problem is that some people want to make shortages like this permanent by going full communism.

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