Second Thought's Walmart Fallacy

@ScubaMySteve

[FyterianTV]

Walmart operates within a market with market prices. Additionally businesses like Walmart with many departments often have departmental budgets, and nothing is unaccounted for: if the cafe needs another carton of milk from the deli within a store, this is accounted for in the cafe's budget and ticked off against the deli. This idea that corporations are socialism is... frustrating.

[James--Parker]

Anyone who thinks local democracy or democratic local corporations are the answer to anything has clearly never delt with a HOA.

[medanon]

I don't know how he can call himself Second Thought when he hasn't had the First.

[SeanA]

Walmart doesn’t function in a vacuum. Just because it’s big and plans ahead doesn’t mean it doesn’t keep prices low in response to competition

[Gringosaurus]

True story: My brother was selected to be an ambassador to a group of college kids coming over to Florida from the Soviet union. This was in the early 80s he took them to a Publix which is a grocery store here in Florida and they swore that we had set it up and that it was actually fake, so my brother told him to pick a direction any direction he’ll drive as far and as long as he wants him to and stop anywhere he wants at any grocery store and they’ll have the same thing and he did this and they were literally shocked! But what shocked them the most was the fact that there’s more than one type of cheese. LoL!

[LeGuJ]

You missed the whole point of both the book and the Second Thought's video to a point that made your rant too painful to watch past 7:08 ...
No one said that Walmart was democratic.
No one said that corporations are countries.
Planned economy is a condition for a striving group (be it social or corporate).
Yet planning the economy is not a sufficient condition for it to strive lastingly and equally.

What's so hard about that for you to end up summarizing them so wrong and obliviously ?

You confusedly aggregate things that both the video and the book made their whole point to show how they're distinguishable (and should be distinguished) so much that it feels hard to believe that you do it in good faith hence the tone of this comment, my apologies if you are, in good faith, thinking that but I'd have to tell you that you are still missing the point undermining, in the process, anything relevant/interesting you might be trying to say.

[tacitus]

The closest companies get to "planning democratically" is Design By Committee, and there's a reason why it's a meme.

[dfmrcv]

So... capitalism is now socialism?

...I... I have no words.

[gigaenthusiast]

The obsession with democratizing a companies decisions is funny. Do people like Second Thought really expect every citizen to have the knowledge, let alone willpower, to vote on every single decision needed to produce every single good and service in an economy? The scale of this voting process would be massive and inefficient.

[LuisRomeroLopez]

*Fun fact:* The founder of Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) cites Hayek's «Use of Knowledge In Society» as an influence in the developing of the concept of Wikipedia.

[AkilanNarayanaswamy]

I can already hear Kirk: "Don't make me tap the sign"

[ketotrucker]

I’ve needed a fuse for my home AC or zip tie for my car and they’re open at midnight in my town. Saved my life

[aldum]

For the love of Beelzebob, no! It's not a knowledge problem, it's a calculation problem. Mises identified the impossibility of calculation without a market, Hayek should be a tiny footnote here. Knowledge is a red herring, and a weaker argument which leaves the door open for 'muh AI' and 'muh modern computers with much powa' talking points. It's not just that a central planner can't know everything (true, but irrelevant), but that in the abscence of markets, there's no way to aggregate the preferences of actors. So no, even with infinite compute, you can't centrally plan an economy, as Mises puts it, there's no economizing going on without prices.

[florkyman]

Planned economys are delegated more then then predicted.

[JChang]

I am an union member and the meetings take forever, but now imagine that applied to production.

This socialist plan will fall apart similar to the 20th Century Motor Company.

[KirkWilcox]

b-b-b-b-b-but wouldn't you rather live in a society where the people got to decide how to allocate resources via democratic vote, rather than having greedy businesses allocate resources for profit?

[dabik]

“Capitalism works therefore socialism works” is a hell of an argument

[throwawayent]

Gotta hand it to Second Thought, no one else is quite so good at being completely and fundamentally wrong about something within 2 minutes of a video starting, and yet continuing on for another half hour anyhow.

That’s some dedication

[houseofhas]

The secretary general of walmart, & the Central Planning Tsar, sent my family to the gulag, the hardware section of walmart. HELP 😂

[FirstnameLastname-tlbq]

The problem with planned economies isn't that there is planning involved, but that there aren't several competing plans that make putting all your eggs in one basket hard to do