>>1838255>>1838270Your comments are off-topic and you should be deeply ashamed.
Anyway, just wrote an essay working out details of an idea that has been popped up in these threads time and again: fixed prices & Queue Points (TM) for addressing shortages. This is of course superior to just having fixed prices with no way of dealing with supply-demand discrepancies other than a massive buffer (which just looks unworkable). But is this better than just having fluctuating prices for consumer items? Well, here is the essay:
Fixed Prices & Flexibility: Dated Consumption Points & Queue PointsUnder socialism, should prices for consumer items fluctuate? Socialism is supposed to be less chaotic than capitalism. The organization of production and distribution will shift towards doing more planning before and less adjusting after, but there will still be some need for adjusting. Mismatches between production and what people actually want will continue to exist, though hopefully on a smaller scale. Price adjustments can quickly deal with two problems:
1. reducing excess stock of consumer items by lowering price
2. preventing running out by raising price
We are told a story about some situation where dynamic prices make everything work out. This is possible, but is it likely? It’s a common thing in capitalism that firms rather destroy excess inventory than sell it at a lower price. Socialism can have regulations against such destruction. But there are more problems: There is no fixed ratio between how much a price increase of say twenty percent reduces the quantity demanded. There is not even a guarantee that increasing the price reduces demand at all. People can take the price increase as indicating a trend of more price increases to come and so they ask for more units.
Flexible prices can help, but they also cause annoyance. Having wildly fluctuating prices is not popular. Are there alternative ways of dealing with the two problems?
1. An alternative way for dealing with
excess stock: People obtain consumer items with
Dated Consumption Points. The consumer items have “release dates” and each consumption point is only valid for items from a certain date and older. (Note the subtle difference to saying the consumption points expire at a set date. Even if people broadly agree with the idea of expiring consumption points, they will quarrel over the proper “life-span”. In contrast, in this proposal it’s almost like the things themselves are telling people what the situation is.)
You can think something is too expensive, hold on to your DCPs in the vague hope for nicer new things to be released. But then the day comes when everything newly produced cannot be obtained with the old DCPs. Meanwhile, the old pile shrinks because other people use their old DCPs (or new DCPs) to obtain things from the old pile and also some stuff in that pile just rots away. So there is no strong need to lower the prices. Over time, it automatically happens that people look to get the less attractive stuff with their old DCPs before there is nothing left to get with them.
2. An alternative way for dealing with
excess demand: When the buffer stock of an item runs very low and it does not look like production is catching up fast enough, the item’s availability is restricted with a waiting queue. This is not as bad as it sounds because you don’t have to stand in the rain, it is a simulated waiting queue online. Even better, you can jump the queue by bidding
Queue Points. Highest QP bids go first. When it’s your turn, you pay with DCPs as usual and the DCP price might as well be a fixed price. (If you want more than one unit, you have to do the queue thing all over again.)
It might be too big a change in way of life to require that all consumption has to happen through an online interface, so is there a way to dampen demand for something without moving it to the online world and without raising its DCP price? Yes, it could be one of the ways how people get QPs: Refrain today from grabbing in shops items marked as high demand and in thirty days you receive some QPs for that.
By the way, this makes me think of old “crank” proposals to price everything by labor content.Any proposal claiming that pricing things by labor content would be a sound way to organize society invites incredulity:
“What about mismatches between supply and demand?” We dealt with that above.
“Should nature have no price?” Well, that follows from the idea.
“But we can’t just let some random person grab everything in nature!” Fair enough. We can make labor content the standard for DCP prices. For some things, their DCP price can be zero while access to them is rationed by QPs.