I just bought a nearly-new used Herman Miller Aeron chair. It cost me $400, but if I had bought it new from their website it would have cost me ~$1600-1800.
It's a nice chair, but what I think what happens is that a company will buy a new nice chair for every employee, then do massive downsize and/or go bankrupt, and they liquidate these chairs for pennies on the dollar, oversaturating the market and making the chairs fairly cheap on the used market. It's no individual person's money, so they don't really care if they're taking a huge loss, and they might be able to write off a loss on taxes.
But it makes me think that if it's routinely easy to buy an $1800 chair for $400 because this is so common, maybe corporations aren't these hyper-optimized controllers of money.
By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
I just bought a nearly-new used Herman Miller Aeron chair. It cost me $400, but if I had bought it new from their website it would have cost me ~$1600-1800.
It's a nice chair, but what I think what happens is that a company will buy a new nice chair for every employee, then do massive downsize and/or go bankrupt, and they liquidate these chairs for pennies on the dollar, oversaturating the market and making the chairs fairly cheap on the used market. It's no individual person's money, so they don't really care if they're taking a huge loss, and they might be able to write off a loss on taxes.
But it makes me think that if it's routinely easy to buy an $1800 chair for $400 because this is so common, maybe corporations aren't these hyper-optimized controllers of money.
Yeah, that's a problem too. Keynes:
By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.