Jonathan856:
Hello everyone,
I've noticed a significant increase in the price of food over the past year, and I believe this is a concern for many of us. Living in LA, I've seen some food prices nearly double, which can be quite challenging for our community, especially those of us who enjoy exploring different culinary experiences and sharing them with others.
I'm eager to understand the reasons behind this price hike and work towards finding solutions. If you are also interested in addressing this issue and want to collaborate, please reach out. Whether you're a fellow food enthusiast or a friend from church, together we can make a difference and ensure that our love for food remains accessible and enjoyable.
Looking forward to connecting with like-minded individuals!
It would be interesting if this website got the Nobel Prize for this. I know there are many causes, but I also know there are many solutions to each problem. My hope is to bring back low-cost food, so I’m starting with the man in the mirror.
god bless you all. live long and prosper.
Enas:
As all commodities, food is priced by business owners, because those are the people who in our current economic system have the power to do that! In other words, business owners are responsible for the prices that you see, because it is them who decide either how much you will be charged for a commodity, or what is the way in which this decision is handled (or both). Something to note, in the USA, business owners constitute roughly 3%.
So, why do business owners increase their prices? That is pretty simple! They will do that if and when this is the best way to increase or protect their profits. The other side of this is the ever-increasing cost of living that everyone other than the business owners experience! Here you can notice a dichotomy between business owners and non-business owners (with the majority of the second group being workers / employees)
Then there is the market issue. Markets can be seen as mechanism with which shortages are handled. When there is a shortage of a commodity, people start to bid up the price of it, indirectly (the business owner does this directly, following the demand vs the supply that they see). As the prices go up, the people that are poor start to drop out because they can no longer afford it. Because of this, less people are interested in that commodity, so at some point the remaining people become few enough to be able to be satisfied by the supply of that commodity.
The above are two key chatacteristics of a capitalist system. Food simply does not get a pass, so long as its production and distribution is done in the context of the private sector. (Theoretically it can be done in the context of state, or public, sector with the most notable example of this being the Soviet Union).
The conversation of how all the above can be fixed is much of the essense of socialism.
A key takeaway of this is while prices might be fixed to deal with high prices, supply will necessarily go down. Why produce a good if you're not going to be paid for doing so?
