while doing nothing useful to anyone
Scalpers serve as a market mechanism that ensures that people who are willing to pay the most for the console get it (first).
I may be misremebering, but when Sony launched the PS2 they were selling it for like $1000 the first month and they slowly dropped the price every couple of months until they reached about $400 a year after launch. It might have also been the retailers doing that.
But that is what they teach you in Econ101, that in a free market the best solution to every problem is to charge what the market will bear.
Arguably a smart thing for Sony would be to run an auction to sell the consoles and pocket the money that goes to the scalpers now. On the other hand that would not be a good look for Sony which means scalpers serve a dual function, regulate the price and take the heat off from Sony.
Lol, rare to see people defending scalpers, even the chuds usually fucking despise them
Admittedly only when they are scalping something the chud wants but still
Libertarians love to defend scalpers. Particularly at the start of the Covid pandemic, there were a lot of them defending hoarding.
I got some redditor to consider socialism based off of an argument I made that everyone would have PS5s in a planned economy
In planned economy cloud gaming would make more sense than everyone owning an expensive single purpose computer they only occasionally use.
Maybe it doesn’t work yet? Some people swear by the Stadia thing, so maybe it’s getting closer. I guess it depends on your connection to the servers.
Either way if we’re talking about planned economy those things could be ameliorated.
A server farm/greenhouse in every apartment building! :mao-aggro-shining:
I like seeing takes like this getting popular, they do tremendous damage to liberal narratives about the “fairness” and “meritocracy” of capitalism
We should promote the use of libertarians as our useful idiots
