Folk become billionaires by providing needs, do they? Well we never....
There’s much to laugh at here from the Progressive Economy Forum. The insistence that high fuel prices must be battled when it’s been public policy to increase the relative price of fossil fuels as against renewables for decades now just as one example. The calling into the conversation of the horrors of economic rents when the major earners of said rents are - righteously - governments on such fossil fuels.
This amuses:
The Competition and Markets Authority last week reported that “mark ups” on prices, the amount added to the costs of something being sold in order to give the seller a profit, by the biggest and most profitable companies have risen from 58% in 2008 to 82% in 2020.
Mark up and gross profit are intimately related. Gross profit being revenues minus the cost of goods sold - and before the payment of wages. So, the result of mark ups rising is that more of the revenue from sales is going to the workers in wages. And progressives are complaining about this?
But our favourite chuckle generator here is this:
As Oxfam’s research showed this week, the pandemic and its aftermath have seen the world’s super-rich become monstrously richer. And it is the owners of the essentials of modern life – in food, energy, pharmaceuticals and tech – that have seen the fastest growth in their wealth, with a new billionaire created every 30 hours.
Isn’t that marvellous? The inventors and producers of new foods - meatless meat perhaps - fracking, vaccines and smartphones get gloriously rich. Even as 97% of the benefits of the technologies flow to us, the consumers. This putting us everyday folk on the right end of the greatest bargain in history. Sure, the guys at Google have a fleet of jets, one estimate has the value of search and email to each consumer at $18,000 a year. Multiply that out by a few billion consumers and who cares how rich the innovators are, it’s us out here making out like bandits.
People become billionaires by providing what folk desire do they? And this is being used as a critique of the one and only economic system that has ever made the average guy and or gal rich, is it?
James Meadway is director of the Progressive Economy Forum
We’d have to grade this as F -. See us after class. For free market capitalism sure ain’t perfect but this essay manages to miss the very point of it.