this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Why state owned grocery stores?
provide more affordable groceries. depending on where they would be, they'd either provide food for food deserts, or create competition for other grocery stores, which should lead to cheaper food overall.
This would be a pretty solid idea for Australia, since we basically just have a local supermarket duopoly, then some foreign or small supermarkets, so it would be a breath of fresh air to have a lack of price gouging, although sadly I doubt it'd be as successful as AusPost, but we'll see.
To lower prices presumably.
No necessity should be for-profit (exclusively).
If it is required (by nature, civilization, or by law) it is literally extortion to make a profit on it.
While I don't disagree with this sentiment, it can be taken too far:
So within the necessities to stay alive and aligned with the means and needs of the society I can agree. Where this all falls apart is that inevitably some tribunal will decide this and inevitably someone will take control of said tribunal to funnel the best food/health care/education/jobs to their cronies, as anyone who lives in a former Soviet state like myself can attest to.
He was asked what he'd do if the grocery store thing fails, and he said, "If it doesn't work, we'll just stop doing it."
Sad state of affairs that something as basic as this is so refreshing and not completely normal.
That's why I mentioned exclusivity.
There should be high end private grocers. There should be plastic surgeons. These should be allowed to be privately owned
Yeah, the hard part is deciding where the line is. This is why I'm a Social Democrat rather than a full libertarian or communist. The places that do socialism well (like Scandinavia) do it by using it where it's most effective and using capitalism where it's most effective. This is a never ending debate, which is absolutely needed to get this line drawn in the correct place.
But plastic surgeons are a necessity for some, no?
Why would you not want to live in a post scarcity society? There would be no downside except you don't get to feel you are better than someone else because of the stuff you posess or the money you make. Your comment reads very much like "fuck you I got mine"
Of course I want to live in a post-scarcity society.
Unfortunately I don't live in a post-scarcity world. There are limits to everything. Energy, labor, minerals, fertilizer, economies, governments, etc. Due to abundant energy from fossil fuels we have started to believe that anything is possible and that's great, and I hope we do manage to continue via AI and automation and new technologies to get closer to post scarcity. But we aren't there today.
The other thing I don't like about post scarcity utopias like the Venus Project (and yes, I've spent a lot of time researching them), is that when it comes to governance, the current plan just seems to be old fashioned communism with a ton of handwaving about how technology will solve everything else. Communist societies of the past also had access to technology, and they didn't produce anything resembling post scarcity. As a matter of fact, if anything, they mainly produced more scarcity most of the time when compared to capitalist ones.
So for the time being I think the best we can do is to allow capitalism to do what it does best (innovation, scaling, bringing down costs), and let socialism do the things that capitalism can't handle (economic externalities like climate change, basic human needs that profit motives greatly mess up such as health care and education, solving food and housing insecurity, etc.).
Someday maybe we will get there with enough automation and some fancy resource management software, but I do very much fear the wrong people slanting those systems in their favor. Good governance and oversight will always be paramount to making any system work, and just hand waving about technology won't be enough.
Price gauging has been a major problem at Canadian grocers since COVID. Basically prices went up with supply chain issues / inflation but have not been adjusted for improvements in inflation since then.
These are for profit entities. They would steal a quarter from the poor and hungry if they could.
That's the fundamental flaw to capitalism - not that it concentrates wealth and power (because that is perhaps human nature) but that it celebrates it.
It conditions us to think that concentrating wealth is not only morally right but something we should all aspire to. That competing is morally superior to sharing.
Ultimately, if capitalists accrue so much wealth and power that they can buy out the interests that would seek to regulate them through democratic will, we then relinquish our democracy for feudalism.
I think that price gouging is mainly a result of allowing too much consolidation via buyouts and mergers, and not actively enough perusing antitrust and anti price fixing enforcement.
I suppose if it's allowed to get too bad, the government could try to compete in the market, but governments are almost never the most efficient way to do things and can rarely effectively compete on efficiency against a functioning open market. In my eyes, regulation of the open market via labor law, protecting unions, trust busting and anti collusion enforcement is a far better way for government to solve this problem.
Unfortunately a government that's not functioning well enough to do this kind of oversight will almost certainly fail at trying to compete against in the open market as a grocery store too. At which point you are just running subsidized food banks, which is also fine by me but I don't think subsidizing all food for everyone will work in most government budgets.