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Mobile Homes Are So Expensive Now, Hurricane Victims Can't Afford Them (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Hurricane victims emerging from ravaged trailer parks are discovering that the U.S. mobile-home market has left them behind. In Florida and Texas, dealerships are swarmed by buyers looking to rebuild their lives after hurricanes Harvey and Irma, but many leave disappointed. The industry, led by Warren Buffett's Clayton Homes, is peddling such pricey interior-designer touches as breakfast bars and his-and-her bathroom sinks. These extras, plus manufacturers' increased costs for labor and materials, have pushed average prices for new double-wides up more than 20 percent in five years, putting them out of reach for many of the newly homeless.
Conversely, anybody who fails to realise that the form capitalism is in now is utterly unsustainable, achieves the exact opposite of what a free market is claimed to be, and serves only to protect encumbant players has also drank the koolaid and isn't open to reason.
Capitalism and the "free market" as envisioned by Republicans pretty much boils down to entrenched monopolies protected by lawmakers who receive kickbacks, and who nominate industry shills to perform the regulatory oversight in such a way that industry gets whatever it wants at the expense of consumers.
Sorry, your flippant dismissal of people who point out how utterly broken commerce is in the US marks you as well and truly beyond reason.
EVERY government body these days has had political appointees who have made their living fighting to make the game lopsided for corporations. And EVERY single one of those is bending over backwards to ensure it happens.
The greedy douchebags who need to be regulated are the ones setting the regulations, and ensuring that the greedy douchebags they're supposed to be regulating are given carte blanche for rent seeking, distorting markets, engaging in anti-competitive behaviour, entrenching monopolies, and being rid of the laws which are supposed to protect us from them.
This broken version of capitalism? This is NOTHING like Adam Smith described, and is in fact a shining example of pretty much everything he said you needed to guard against or the system would become toxic and dangerous.
What Americans fail to realise if their government is pretty much in the hands of corporations, and America is essentially an oligarchy under Trump. It's rich assholes changing laws to ensure they themselves will achieve maximum profit at someone else's expense.
The current version of capitalism is completely unhinged, is policy without evidence or merit, and is completely unsustainable. It's a corrupt and broken system ran to benefit a small amount of people, and it does so by ensuring that the only "citizens" whose rights are protected are those of the corporations.