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The Dark Side of the PlayStation 3 Launch
An anonymous reader writes "Kotaku is running an article prompted by an email from a foreign student in Japan. The reader unveils the sad reality of the modern gaming industry. Japanese businessmen made ample use of homeless people and Chinese nationals to obtain PS3s for re-sale. There was also a large amount of pushing and shoving, some fights, and almost no police presence at the most crowded stores." From the article: "Based on my observations of the first twenty PS3s sold at Bic Camera, they were all purchased by Chinese nationals, none of whom bought any software. After making their purchase, television crews asked for interviews but all were declined. These temporary owners of PS3s would then make their way down the street where their bosses waited. After several minutes, a dozen PS3s were rounded up, as their Japanese business manager paid out cash to those who waited in line for them. I witnessed a homeless-looking Chinese man, in his sixties or seventies get paid 20,000 yen for his services and was then sent away." Update: 11/12 05:40 GMT by Z : You're right. Sony only shares a portion of the blame here. Offsides on my part.
Launching and selling out of millions is a far cry from a couple hundred thousand, and it's not even a close comparison. Sorry.
The ONLY reason Sony is "launching" now is to have the official launch before the holiday season. That's it. They could've just as legitimately launched a month ago selling 500 consoles, it would be the same effect - if your available volume is that far under the expected sale numbers, you're at least somewhat responsible for what happens when somehow none are available for the people that want to buy them.
It's one thing to claim to be caught off-guard by the number of people who want to buy something (yeah, Tickle-me-elmo was impossible to get, but I don't think they truly could have predicted millions of sales for something like that), but if you deliberately launch with 10% or less the capacity needed, you're just doing it to make statements like "look how amazing our launch was, we sold out in 5 minutes!"
What, government intervention *doesn't* hinder capitalism?
You obviously have never taken International Economics, or else you would have seen -- mathematically (it's simple algebra and Cartesian graphs) -- how a tariff raises the price of a product above its equilibrium level, causing a supply/demand imbalance. Indeed, this is true of any excise/sales/consumption tax.
You likewise don't understand the problem of price controls, in which a min/max price is set for a given product. Example? Gasoline in the 1970s. Price controls on gasoline resulted in the supply shocks that manifested the long lines at gas pumps Americans remember so well.
I could go on, but it is plain to see you don't understand economics. Your examples don't make economic sense, and they frankly aren't even coherent:
What? No. Government is a political body of people agreeing -- supposedly (because no group of people ever agrees 100% on anything) -- upon a standard set of laws and rules by which one group of men governs another group. Administering such a structure requires capital, sure (and the U.S. did so through massive deficit spending and loans in its inception). But the desire to organize a government at all comes prior to the capital, and that capital is extracted via taxation -- something that, in creating the government, the citizenry (or dictators) must consider and decide upon.
Maintenance of tiered labor markets? Such border protections are a government creation, moron -- they are entirely antithetical to a free-market. In absence of government, i.e. given the existence of a pure free-market, you would not have a U.S.-Mexico border dispute, because no such border would exist: labor and capital would be free to move *unmolested* across what currently is defined as a political border... Instead, *government* border patrol asks you for your passport, asks you whether you are carrying any special fruits or vegetables, and might even search your car for drugs.
Border patrol, in fact, is a classic example of government intervention hampering capitalism's growth.
Modern liberals operate under the fiction that government is a boon to capitalism; the taxation (to say nothing of the effects of the regulations, opportunity costs, etc.) required to grow the government to the size such liberals deem necessary, however, ensure that government's growth crowds-out capitalism.
Now, I would argue (in contrast to the an-caps) that there are a certain few cases in which government provides some function of the economy better than the private market does.
The establishment and maintenance of a common currency is one of them. It's more efficient to carry around a single credit card that exchanges in the currency of USD than it is to carry stored-value cards for each vendor you visit, for example. (The same is true of paper currency.)
And the provision of law enforcement and a judicial system lends itself to needing a fair and impartial court; yet, when those tasked to such administration are hired by the highest-bidder, they have incentive to work only for those who pay them the most, to the detriment of the rest of the legal system's participants. Of course, you still have the problem of how to make the courts impartial when prosecuting a case against the government -- after all, it is the government that pays their salary... But arguably, the U.S. has done a reasonably-good job of this (due
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
But (it appears) you are making a similar assumption: the standard assumption that in absence of government, a society descends into "warlordism" - rule by warlords. That is, if a government doesn't exist to enact some borders (like the U.S.-Mexico border), one or more people will do so instead.
That may well be the case, but there is no way to know: where in history has a society existed without a government?. In any case, given that the behavior of government and warlords is to create artificial, political barriers, the question you must then ask yourself is this: what is the difference between government and a warlord?
Ostensibly, government -- western governments, and particularly the U.S. govn't -- is reigned-in by:
1) its design, in which there exists a separation of functional powers (legislative, judicial, and executive) and checks-and-balances between those powers, and
2) by the power of a voting public
But really, isn't this just another way of saying we have an elected body of warlords? Effectively, yes, it is.
So, to return to the main point. Would labor and capital be restricted by non-governmental actors in absence of government intervention? There firstly must be a reason why they would do this...
Undoubtedly there would be some people creating such restrictions. People would put up fences and walls and guard towers and such around the property they have either seized by force or purchased by trade, so other people would be unable to use it. People would either have to buy the rights to travel across the property, or go around it.
And this logical exploration leads to one reason why I am not an an-cap. Such behavior, in the long-run, leads to an inefficient outcome: imagine if you had to pay a toll to cross every piece of 1, 10, 100 acre property in the U.S.. It'd be a nightmare of either stop-and-go traffic, or a ridiculous amount of more-efficient toll infrastructure (like the I-Pass/EZ-Pass found in IL, NY, and several other states, but on a much more localized scale). You'd have millions of iterations of transaction costs and/or infrastructure costs that could be done-away with more efficiently by requiring takings for public use (as the U.S. Constitution allows, provided the individual is justly compensated) -- namely, the construction of a roadway usable by all citizens, funded either via taxes, or at least through the use of a less-common toll than the an-cap society would eventually impose.
Even if, in the an-cap society, a private entity decided to make a business of setting up private roads by buying up property from people and creating a tollway infrastructure much like we have here in IL, the evolution of such a business would be so slow (due to lack of capital) as to make non-useful headway as time progresses. And there is still the issue of that road-building entity dealing with homeowners in locations they require who won't sell for whatever reason (domain-squatting on the Internet is analogous to this).
No, it is vastly more-efficient, it seems to me, to bulldoze the occasional set of properties for what is very-clearly a public use: transportation and freedom of movement. Depending on the size and scope of the project, I tend to feel this way about infrastructure projects in general... (Wi-Fi, no. Roadways, yes. Electricity, phone lines, fiber, and cable TV? Maybe.)
So to tie this all back in with border disputes. In absence of government, would there be border disputes? Not to the scale to which I was speaking, i.e., coast-to-coast (again,
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?