Quote:
Originally Posted by Flames in 07
You have made this argument or a similar one many times in many threads. And it's flat out wrong. Your not going to find a single economist who will tell you that subsidizing inefficient business models is going to win in the long run. It keeps people from retraining into jobs the economy wants and the waste slows the economy down. The 1-2 bucks you speak of, is something I presume you'd apply to many situations and you will simply be creating a honorable welfare system.
It's nice to have jobs, what you are arguing for sounds great. But your society will lose in the long run 100 out of 100 times. Efficient economies and Effiecient work forces will eat the lunch of the slow one. It's just a matter of time as commerce becomes more global and pace of change increases.
We don't need milk men coming to our doors every Monday and Thursday to exchange the little plastic tokens for cartons of milk, and society as a whole is worse off if we pretend we do.
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I'm not saying we should stop businesses from being profitable or efficient, what I'm saying is when a company increases profits or efficiency(I even mentioned that the decrease in retail jobs due to growth in online shopping lead to an increase in parcel delivery jobs) but when they do not use the gains from it to reinvest in job creation and increasing consumerism there will eventually be a tipping point where economic growth comes to halt that we won't be able to recover from. Walmart or Amazon can reduce labour costs by installing selfserve kiosks or using machines to make deliveries, but there is only so much they can possibly reinvest those savings into. Walmart only needs so many stores to serve its customers, so they will eventually reach a point where despite their savings they will not be able to create new jobs. These machines they use are not made domestically so what happens when the jobs they eliminate cannot be recovered in other industries? People on welfare don't exactly brag about how much stuff they are able to buy.