And still pay the charges, which is what they don't want to do. And deal with the paperwork. None of that goes away just because you're doing it by phone. If I'm selling something, why in hell do I want to pay VIsa a charge for "ease" when a ten dollar bill doesn't charge me and handle paperwork that a cash transaction lacks? It's not how easy it is to do, It's paying an unnecessary middleman.
It's not just lack of access, it's lack of desire. Go and try to buy things at any venue that is ad hoc like an open air food market or flee market. Some will use cards, many won't because they don't want to bother with the paperwork hassle and fees. Cash in one form or another will always be desired.
But the idea that it's a [good, bad] thing should be agreed first,
It has been. The french government is democratically elected.
More of that high-quality Slashdot/Dice.com editing.
Is there any other kind?</snark>
Well then you do it! Seriously dude you show thes asshat editors that make a spelling mistake and show them how a really smart person does it. I am looking forward to seeing many articles from none other than Safety Cap.
In a breach of playground protocol, I triple dog dare ya.
Seriously it's a no-win business model. There was a reason they had bad publicity in the first place. There is a reason they'll turn on you.
simply shrinking the market doesn't radically change things,
The market doesn't shrink. The market is the number of exchanged goods. The market doesn't care if there are 200 merchants or 250 merchants. What changes is the distribution of goods and merchants, and when the number of merchants is very low and their concentration of market power high, we get into situations (oligopoly, monopoly) that we do not want because we know they are bad.
If you want a book that isn't in the bestsellers list, then in your local town there's probably only one or two book shops that stock it at best and most likely none.
For the past 20 years, when I go to a bookstore and I want a book they don't have, they could almost always order it and have it for me the next day.
while it'd be nice to have geographically distributed demand for labour, in practice this has not been true since the invention of cities.
I'm not talking about a perfect equilibrium. I'm talking about the simple fact that if your country has one region with 50% unemployment rates and one region where employers can't find workers, your whole country will destabilze.
Of course there will always be differences. But if they get too extreme, the consequences are much higher and much more expensive then the costs of some small interventions.
What's more once you decide that lots of people deserve to be protected from changing times,
I never said anything like that and my arguments are completely unrelated to technical or other progress. So please burn the strawman somewhere else.
Anything dealing with multiverse is speculative. Math does not constitute evidence.
This is social engineering by subsidizing one group of products and letting other products pay the price.
No it isn't. Protective tariffs are another form of subsidy, and reducing them is a good thing. Plenty of (mostly dumb) subsidies will remain, but this is a step in the right direction.
The amount of arable land in the world is fixed.
In America, the arable land is owned by less than 3% of the people. In Ethiopia, it is 80%. So Ethiopia should be richer, right?
Concentrated wealth does not create jobs, distributed wealth does.
America has 492 billionaires, while Ethiopia has none. So Ethiopia wins again.
If people cannot afford to buy new shoes every year then there will NOT be a shoe factory
Yet in America, where people buy plenty of shoes, there are almost no shoe factories. In Vietnam, where most people cannot afford to buy new shoes every year, there are plenty of shoe factories, more than any other country.
It takes two people to create a job: one to offer the position, and one to accept it.
Unless they are the same person. Billions of people are self-employed. Employing yourself is by far the most common way to get rich. People that seek out, or create, opportunity tend to do much better than people that sit around and whine about nobody handing it to them.
those who offer the positions are greedy
Indeed. This is why economic systems that harness greed (e.g. capitalism) are far better at generating prosperity than economic systems based on virtue (e.g. socialism).
small local bookshops are inherently worth protecting. Why is that?
Because you need many, many competitors in a market for it to actually be a market. The amount of large corporations any market can support is limited and fairly low, general business wisdom has it that it is around 3-5 with the first 3 being profitable and two or so more being able to just barely make it.
If you want many participants in a market, most of them will be small. That is why small shops are worthy of protection.
You also want to have employment in your country be fairly even, and not have some areas with high demand and low supply and some with low demand and many unemployed, which is why local shops are worthy of protection.
Really, you just need to use your brain a little more and it's all very simple.
Perhaps the space the bookshops used up can be replaced by coffee shops
Maybe, but this is not at all about bookshops being replaced by something else, it's about small competitors being driven out by large competitors, so put the strawman away again.
Protectionism is protectionism,
And sometimes it is needed. The whole "free market über alles" philosophy makes assumptions that are not true in the real world, such as perfect transparency. To come even close to working as it should, the free market needs to be guided. Among other things, protecting small competitors guarantees that it remains a free market and doesn't turn into an oligopol or a monopol.
The ones that actually provide value to the customer will stay due to people actually visiting them.
Unfortunately, they will not. Too many people will use the cozy atmosphere and the good service to make their selection, and then order it online because it costs a dollar less.
Yes, poor buggy whip makers will be out of jobs in the short term, but we can't all be riding carriages into the future...
Except that Amazon has not invented the car. The buggy whip makers are not going to be out of jobs, they are going to be replaced by minimum-wage buggy whip warehouse slaves.
With an economic model based on the exploitation of scarcity of resources
Except that our economy is mostly NOT based on the exploitation of scare resources. Someone writing code is not "stealing" from anyone else. They are creating value from nothing. The raw materials (petroleum and metal ore) in an iPhone is worth about 5 cents. The main commodities that our economy needs (oil, coal, iron ore, silica sand) are not "scarce", and it is absurd to claim that poor people would be better off somehow if they were left in the ground.
they don't care as long as its some homeless 'bum'
So if we close all the diamond mines, we will no longer have homeless bums? Sure. Whatever.
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
