Ontario Premier Doug Ford lamented Thursday that grocery store prices are sky high, but nixed the idea of banning so-called surveillance pricing and slammed a pilot project for city-run grocery stores as socialist and “crazy.”
“That is what we believe in. That’s a capitalist society, a market. The other one is socialism. Socialism does not work. You go around and dictating and overseeing every single price, no. If there’s collusion on pricing, I’ll go after them and tear them to shreds, but nothing beats a free market.”
One thing I keep noticing about right-wing thinking is that it tends to be very coarse-grained, black and white, with no subtlety or shades of grey. It’s either all or nothing. But reality is never all or nothing, it’s always shades of grey, ambiguous and complex. Look at how conservatives talk about any topic - vaccines or immigration or science funding or transgender health care or climate change - and you’ll find this tendency for unrealistic all-or-nothing crudeness.
That and also it’s just a collection of dumb ideologies for dumb people. “Socialism doesn’t work” falls apart the second you know anything and there are so many examples of it being better for everyone. They’re championing capitalism which has been shown time and again to not work for anyone but the ultra rich(those for whom it was designed).
I mean I’m no capitalist, but even his argument for capitalism here is bullshit. The only world where surveillance pricing is sensible (from a free market capitalist POV) is where you make an argument for surveillance perfecting market actors’ information to achieve a better equilibrium. But that just isn’t true, because with surveillance you have perfect information on behalf of the seller but wildly imperfect knowledge and lock-in on behalf of the buyer.
One thing I keep noticing about right-wing thinking is that it tends to be very coarse-grained, black and white, with no subtlety or shades of grey. It’s either all or nothing. But reality is never all or nothing, it’s always shades of grey, ambiguous and complex. Look at how conservatives talk about any topic - vaccines or immigration or science funding or transgender health care or climate change - and you’ll find this tendency for unrealistic all-or-nothing crudeness.
That and also it’s just a collection of dumb ideologies for dumb people. “Socialism doesn’t work” falls apart the second you know anything and there are so many examples of it being better for everyone. They’re championing capitalism which has been shown time and again to not work for anyone but the ultra rich(those for whom it was designed).
I mean I’m no capitalist, but even his argument for capitalism here is bullshit. The only world where surveillance pricing is sensible (from a free market capitalist POV) is where you make an argument for surveillance perfecting market actors’ information to achieve a better equilibrium. But that just isn’t true, because with surveillance you have perfect information on behalf of the seller but wildly imperfect knowledge and lock-in on behalf of the buyer.