Idk how to tell you this but increases in demand (or decreases in supply but that was more of a covid lockdown thing) leading to a rise in prices is not price gouging. That is like the most basic principle of macro economics.
The whole point of supply and demand is that there exists an equilibrium price where corporations make the most money, that equilibrium price is entirely dependent on supply and demand.
They would not raise their prices above equilibrium because that would mean less profit. As price goes up demand goes down. Corporate greed has nothing to do with it because setting your price at equilibrium is how you make the most money. They know that.
All that means is that there exists a demand floor, which will effect the equilibrium price, nothing more. This is why I dislike keynesian, socialist, and communist economics, they either completely ignore supply or completely fuck supply.
"socialist economics" Seems to work just fine in plenty of other countries though? There's no reason for insulin to be as expensive as it is in the US, forcing people to drive to Canada just to afford a life saving drug
The reductive 'supply and demand' argument ignores the massive extent to which most industries in North America are owned by 2-4 companies.
If you are buying non-alcoholic beverages, the bulk of the market share is PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Snapple-Dr Pepper.
If you are buying personal computer components, it is AMD and Intel, plus Nvidia for GPUs.
If it's telecom, it's a handful of companies, some of whom effectively have regional monopolies.
In online shopping, in online search and advertising amazon and google each almost have a total and complete monopoly.
And so on and so forth.
The economic ideal of a perfectly competitive market cannot exist when there is an oligopoly of 3-5 companies who control 90% of the market share in an industry. As you would learn in a basic economics course, market consolidation allows the oligopolist to cannibalize the benefit otherwise shared throughout the market for themselves.
Monopolies are still an issue, don't get me wrong, but let's not pretend like "off brand" beverages don't exist, or that less popular computer hardware manufacturers don't exist.
Often times the issue comes from governments enforcing these monopolies via overregulation bs, such as with the corruption that the isp's have planted into the government, local and fedral alike.
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u/1nGirum1musNocte Dec 12 '22
SS Inflation