Opinion: Why Americans are bummed out about the economy | CNN
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Because grocery bills and rent prices are unlikely to return to where they were just a few short years ago, the psychological scars from the war on inflation will linger, write Dana M. Peterson and Erik Lundh.

US consumers remain unimpressed with this progress, however, because they remember what they were paying for things pre-pandemic. Used car prices are 34% higher, food prices are 26% higher and rent prices are 22% higher than in January 2020, according to our calculations using PCE data.

While these are some of the more extreme examples of recent price increases, the average basket of goods and services that most Americans buy in any given month is 17% more expensive than four years ago.

  • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    This long explanation supporting capitalism and ‘the market’ fails to take something crucial into account that all these market promoters forget:

    Labor cannot have an undistorted market so long as the option to not sell your labor isn’t a valid one.

    For any market to be relatively undistorted, a seller must be free to choose not to sell at all if none of the offers are equal or greater than her assessment of the value of her product.

    However, as long as labor is needed in order to procure food, shelter, and adequate living conditions, this cannot be the case - people are coerced into selling their labor at values lower than their assessment of its value because to not do so means being denied adequate living conditions.

    If people were free to choose not to sell their labor without this coercion, then those seeking to purchase people’s labor would find they likely cannot find anywhere near as many people willing to sell at the price they are offering.

    Basically, you are making excuses for the fact that due to this market distortion coercing people to sell their labor, the divide between productivity and wages has grown. It is not necessary to lock wages to productivity - if people have the option, and they see massive profits being pocketed off their work with increasingly minimal compensation, they would choose not to sell…except there comes the coercion to ensure they don’t do that.

    I wonder if the same excuses would be made if we turned it around and told companies they must sell their products, no matter how little the customers are offering…