Economic Theory 101
The point of a trade is to leave both parties better off afterwards. Please note, not feeling better or thinking they are better off but actually better off. Of course this is dependent on the parties knowing what is good for them, if you buy lottery tickets and don't win anything on them then you are not better off but that is as much your fault as the fault of the person selling you the tickets.
If I buy food I get a meal without having to grow or hunt the food myself. The shop keeper gets my money. We should both be better off. Likewise if a farmer wants to sell 500 gallons of milk then selling to a store rather than trying to find 4000 people who want to buy a pint of milk makes sense. The farmer gets paid and can get on with farming, the store can sell the milk without having to learn how to raise cows. This gets more important when you consider tea and coffee, I am not going to go to the trouble of contacting a tea grower and asking them to send me a enough tea to make a cuppa. I will go to a store and buy it. The tea may have passed through the hands of many traders before it reaches me but I only need to know where to find my closest store that stocks my preferred brand.
Trade fails to work correctly when one party has the power to distort the trade. If the tea grower can only sell to one broker then that broker can pay less because the grower cannot go anywhere else. If a country charges different tariffs for bananas from Africa than they do for bananas from the caribbean then purchasers will buy from the country with the lower tariff.
So please don't tell me that business or trade as a concept is evil or bad. If you want to point to a specific business or trade and tell me that is evil or bad then fine but please tell me why you consider it so.
This rant brought to you courtesy of despair at rants on the evils of all businesses which appear not to contain any understanding of how businesses actually work.
If I buy food I get a meal without having to grow or hunt the food myself. The shop keeper gets my money. We should both be better off. Likewise if a farmer wants to sell 500 gallons of milk then selling to a store rather than trying to find 4000 people who want to buy a pint of milk makes sense. The farmer gets paid and can get on with farming, the store can sell the milk without having to learn how to raise cows. This gets more important when you consider tea and coffee, I am not going to go to the trouble of contacting a tea grower and asking them to send me a enough tea to make a cuppa. I will go to a store and buy it. The tea may have passed through the hands of many traders before it reaches me but I only need to know where to find my closest store that stocks my preferred brand.
Trade fails to work correctly when one party has the power to distort the trade. If the tea grower can only sell to one broker then that broker can pay less because the grower cannot go anywhere else. If a country charges different tariffs for bananas from Africa than they do for bananas from the caribbean then purchasers will buy from the country with the lower tariff.
So please don't tell me that business or trade as a concept is evil or bad. If you want to point to a specific business or trade and tell me that is evil or bad then fine but please tell me why you consider it so.
This rant brought to you courtesy of despair at rants on the evils of all businesses which appear not to contain any understanding of how businesses actually work.