Comment by mulmen
10 days ago
Do you honestly believe this? Where did you study economics? This regulation is not about scarcity. It is about over abundance.
Overproduction is a failure mode in capitalist systems. The market can’t correct for this because negative externalities do not feed back into supply or demand.
Actors in a capitalist system have an incentive to maximize profit. How is it profit-maximizing to pay to produce an item and throw it away unsold?
> negative externalities do not feed back into supply or demand.
What is the unaccounted externality? Clothing makers pay for material inputs and labor inputs. They pay for transportation. If they discard goods, they pay for more transportation and for the landfill. What specific externality is unaccounted?
The unaccounted externality is the wasted energy to create a thing and destroy it without ever using it.
This may be profit maximizing because it maintains the exclusivity of the brand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
And you presume to know better than they do what to do with that energy? Do you think you have a general right to override people's resource allocation decisions when you believe they're being wasteful?
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