Inflation here? gas/grocery prices just continue to climb

HoustonSaint68 said
Well, I agree that you have to take the bad with the good but that doesn’t mean the system is completely broken. Now if you’re talking about people who are advocating unregulated free market capitalism, then I get you. But one could just as easily argue that regulated free market capitalism has raised more people out of abject poverty than any other economic system in human history — with the related impact of more quickly advancing democracy. Let’s not be too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I don't think the market is completely broken. What I think is that capitalism is not a moral or political system. It's a method to provide for the exchange of goods and services. Markets do not make decisions nor do they provide a moral foundation for society. Markets allow people to trade one thing for another. Capitalism is simply a means to an end, but this society is so filled with idiots who think in binary terms and who have been conned by one political snake oil salesman or another that we can't simply realize the simply truths I mentioned above.

But to be clear, the market is fine as long as it has training wheels and a structure within which things like our current situation can be addressed without allowing society to be cast into shambles because one group's interests allow them market power which crushes the rest of us.

And, you mentioned globalization which is a whole other topic, but yes, too much of anything is too much. We essentially sold our souls for cheap Chinese plastic crap. We printed and borrowed money for tax cuts for rich people and put off inflation by exchanging that cheap chinese crap for American jobs and, as a consequence, our ability to make our own stuff. Like Masks. 30 years ago, a pack of razor blades made in CT cost more than they do today. Now we don't make them here and so we pay less, but we make less. We have broken construction down into so many specialized pieces that nobody can actually make aything without 25 other people and we are dependent on our freaking enemies whose interests are diametrically opposed to ours. Hell, we are borrowing from our drug dealer in order to get cheaper drugs instead of making them ourselves and here we are.

Shipping companies are making record numbers delivering far less than the market demands, but to increase their capacity will cut into their bottom line and all we hear is "Go Brandon" as if Biden has anything to do with our failure to deal with the pandemic that set these things in motion 18 months ago.