@"If you want to assume that processed food is of lower quality because it lacks certain desirable nutrient, or for any other reason for that matter, there is still organic non-processed food for those who desire it. Nobody has beenn forced to eat the processed food,"

Ok here i disagree with you. There are people for whom organic food is prohibitivrly expensive. Who do no have this choice, they have to eat the lowest quality and/or cheapest food - even tough the health impact in the long run will be even more costly (though in the US, if they are poor enough the government will end up paying through whichever of medicaid/medicare is forpoor people).

That said, McDonalds has specifically targeted young people (with their happy meal) so their audience develops a habit from a young age to associate happiness with eating their food.

At the point the quality almost doesn't matter. The experience of going to McDonalds is something they are selling, and how happy it makes people feels (where consuming any food releases endorphins associated with happiness). It amounts to effective brain-washing, and again, they wouldn't do it if they didn't know it works.

@"Not all firms in the industry can compete based on price, only one or two will be successful with this strategy because if many firms tried to do this,"

That is a fair point, and adds diversity to the market. How and ever, we still see monopolistic tendencies when 90% of food companies are owned by only 10 parent companies.

They will continue to buy up medium sized businesses (the small ones aren't worth the effort of buying, 90% is probably 'enough' of the market to hold... And most small businesses have failed to grow (yet) into medium businesses so there is no point in buying them until they orove they can do something right)

Microsoft bought MineCraft, because of its' brand appeal and community base. I merged the game into it's software monopoly because it couldn't outcompete it. This isn't necessarily a good thing for competition or inventiveness. No games developer would never have developed a game which looked like minecraft, because it was a risk and big companies which have a lot to lose become more risk averse.

So now you have more monopoly, less invention. And Microsoft profiting off of the work and community built by others. And this is not an isolated incident, the whole system is set up to go this direction. There are many new startups who just aim to get big and sell out (Uber perhaps will grow fast enough that it isn't bought out and becomes a large % of its' industry) but quantity and quality are two different things.

And nobody has figured out how to properly monetise the quality of interactions in a social network... Minecraft has quality interactions in its community. And Microsoft bought it for the value of those interactions, but didn't create them, nor has it figured out how to monetise those interactions... Instead it trusts that the strong community will continue to attract more customers to their product, by word of mouth if nothing else... But i digress.

I think it would be amazing/terrible if we had a business model which promoted quality interactions between individuals. Instead most of the time we seem to promote isolation from others, followed by buying products which we are told will fill in the hile left by a lack of interaction. And advertising works! Or it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry.

@"Are you asking me to believe that doctors are paid currently for keeping people sick? I'm not sure what point this exercise would have otherwise"

No, i'm asking you to imagine a system where doctors are paid more the more sick people there are.

Take this real world example: https://www.ted.com/talks/leana_wen_what_your_doctor_won_t_disclose

She describes a system where the doctors decisions are not based on the best interest of the patients but on the doctor's self-interest.

@"I'm not sure about you, but if I go to a doctor and he doesn't help me get any better, I stop going to him. Doctors get paid by patients because their service works, they make unhealthy people healthy."

There is a difference between dealing with an immediate issue (like removing the current symptoms) and dealing with the under-lying causes (like life-style choices).

You could be 'cured' of that pain in your back, but still work/sit in an uncomfortable position which will cause a repeat injury.

The point being, prevention could go so far as adding a sugar tax to discourage certain products (even to the point where producers decide to stop producing something because the price to the consumer is prohibitively expensive... Though with tobacco this have proven ineffective - without also banning advertising and placing warnings on the products)

But individual doctors don't have any reason to support such measures (sorry, any monetary incentive, the may have moral imperative) because of the way they are paid.

I was asking you to imagine a worst case world. Most situations (which are neither black nor white) are worse when you push them to the extreme... Your ideology may seem great, but pushed to the extreme the worst features of free market capitalism would do great harm.

The same is true of the Soviet Union's ideology. And the fact that we have all these compromises (one of the great things about democracy) is example enough that people don't believe a free market is in their interests. They see the worst case, which you clearly do not.

And it is compromise everywhere. Democracies only function by balancing the needs and desires of the citizens to come to an acceptable compromise position. Hence sugar tax, environmental regulation, and public protests against what they see as the worst problems of the day. (As i've mentioned previously, you said 'And as I just said, the majority of these movements are misguided' - their values do not coincide with your values, so you call them misguided...)

@"There is not a moral imperative to see doctors use their gifts to the utmost of their ability because those doctors are not slaves of the state and have the choice on whether to exercise the use of their abilities or not."

I was not proposing the existence of doctor slaves. Though i suppose we could have a class of doctor-slaves, and you'd be ok with that so long as they were adults with all their free-will inact when the decided to become doctor-slaves, right?

@"Yeah, under the first act, you are telling someone that if they consume soda, you are going to steal from them. Blatant act of coercion. Under the second act, you are telling someone that they should want to buy your soda, but the choice is completely theirs on whether they actually do or not. There is a huge difference there."

Nope, How about this: it turns out the state says 'you can trade if you want to, but here is the deal, we get a cut of every transaction to help us fund the protection of your property rights which allows trade grow. Lets say 15% sales tax' And then the people choose whether they want (freely or not as they wish).

(it is 23% on most goods and services in Ireland, up from 21% during before 2008, though children's clothes and foot-wear are 0% along with some basic necessities, like milk)

Everyone is free to make whatever choices they want. Free to own lands, and grow food on it, to trade or not trade depending on what resources they own. But property rights are protected...

@"That is comparing apples to oranges. A deer is an animal. Donald Trump is a human. Humans are given human rights, while animals are given animal rights. The two have always been different. So while it is ok to kill a deer, it is not ok to kill a human"

I disagree, I am a vegetarian specifically because i don't believe there is such a difference, and I would love to hear how you justify your position.

@"I'm not saying that what constitues what the middle class is is arbitrary (although I'm sure there is some debate about where each class ends and the next begins), what I'm saying is that there is no real reason why someone can not be content with being in the lower or upper classes. I don't get why someone must be in the middle class to be happy. Why can a poor person not be happy? Why can a rich person not be happy? If it is because they are comparing themselves to others, then that is really just a personal problem .That is all I was trying to say in regards to the whole class thing. "

Well, i never claimed you had to be middle class to be happy. Most people would assume that the higher the class you are the better, this is largely about social status. Though i'm sure there are some people who detest the upper class attitudes, and would thus prefer to go from being lower class to middle class. Mostly because most historic lower class groups were violently oppressed and didn't want to become their oppressors (like slaves in the South not wanting to become Slaver-owners, though if you can find a counter example that would be interesting).

People DO compare themselves to their neighbours, and a large part of that is a problematic focus on property and ownership. People feel their value is derived from their wealth and income - they try to use their wealth to show off their status (buying big cars, fancy clothes, etc) and this is an issue both individually and for western societies.

I believe that humans naturally tend to fight over social status, most organisations end up with internal political differences (even my scout group, which is an entirely voluntary organisation, has it's internal problems because it has been so successful it is rather large; ~150 youth members...) How and ever, i see no good reason why there should be a link between income/wealth and status. Most 'high status' jobs are paid better than low status jobs.

I would much prefer a universal basic income which was sufficient that everyone could volunteer their time (whether to their community, or whatever else they felt was a worthwhile endeavour - because freedom!) If people want to work that's fine... but in a world where robots are doing all the tedious labour, i see no reason why we should expect humans to continue as they have been.

That said, under the current system (at least in the social democracies of Europe) we don't just have a working class, we also have an unemployed class. Those who survive on state aid. And unfortunately a great many of them could give two fucks about society. They have been kicked in the teeth and told they were failures too many times, and then given a handout which further humiliates. There is no strong ethic of volunteering among the unemployed class, despite the fact that they have ample time on their hands... and making a basic income universal could go a small way towards removing the psychological barriers...

How and Ever, i think humans are still going to compare themselves to their neighbours. And i fear no government policy exists which will change that.

@"You know that is what a corporation is, right? 100% of profits go to the shareholders, nobody else gets a cent of it. Unless you are saying that all of the profit goes to the consumer? Then I'm not sure of any businesses like that. Non-profits would come the closest, but those aren't really businesses, they are charities. "

No, most charities attempt to grow by making profits and re-investing in themselves. But non-profit tends to mean no dividend paid out to share holders.

However, I am postulating something.

The majority of corporations account their income and expenses where they consider services/goods provided as a cost (negative, to be minimised) along with wages to their employees. And they consider payments from customers to be a benefits (a positive to be maximised). However you can actually see how the customer benefits from having this service provided to them. From that perspective the customer is profiting from having the option of availing of the service, and likewise the employee profits from their wages.

Both do social good, in any community (no matter how small) having services available and having employment/income for those who live there is a social good. And it is unfortunate that corporate structure aims to minimise these two positives.

If you were to take a co-operative, where the customers own the corporation, then they wouldn't care about traditional profits they would only care about providing themselves with the service.

Let me give an example, there are numerous food co-ops in ireland, dairy farmers got together as far back as 1908, they pooled their resources to build milk processing plants. The co-op would then buy milk directly from the farmers, process it and distribute it. The farmers had a guaranteed service provider (in the form of industrial milk pasteurisation and homogenisation) Each farmer was still just being paid for the milk they produced on their farm, but the collective benefited from the service provided by the co-op.

The members/shareholders of the co-op didn't care about getting profits out of their investment because the benefit they got was the service provided.

In the US you have housing Co-ops (in a way we don't really have in Ireland) where the service provided is rental accommodation to the members. The members still have to pay for their rent, but they have more say over controlling the building because the co-op itself owns the whole thing... as opposed to some property developer who is looking to get a profit from their investment. The co-op members profit from having a service provided to them, so they don't have any incentive to exploit the tenants (ie themselves).

Does this make any sense? I know i'm using the word profit in the normal english sense instead of the standard business sense. But the point is that changes to the way you account (what you consider a profit) changes the incentives and thus reduce some of the negatives i mentioned about oppressing/exploiting people...

@"Most people just don't know how to handle it in the right manner, they take too much of it on at one time and are bad with paying it back on time. "

Most people aren't good and handling debt, and end up paying out more over their lifetimes than if they had just saved and spent out of their savings. But that kind of delay slows down the economy; it reduces the velocity of currency delaying some of this year's gpd production until the next year, and next year's until the year after. And those whose investments depend on gdp growth have an incentive to increase that.

@"I see these as lifestyle choices, not anything bad. Especially debt" - sure, but like children, some people can't make good decisions and end up harming themselves. Readily available debt can be harmful, especially when people are not particularly financially savvy.

And you've already agreed that children should be protected, so why not adults?

@(on tobacco) "If the state was offering healthcare, that would make sense. I don't think it should be though"

Again talking about protecting adults from harmful choices; if the state in question is the US, it does provide healthcare to both the old and the poor. I still don't see why preventative healthcare shouldn't be organised at a state level to protect citizens. The same way the army of police is.

I know you made some distinction seemingly based on whether the damage was being done by humans coercing you, or by nature giving you a disease; but it turns out it is not that simple. Especially when Tobacco companies have a history of doing something which even you deem coercive...

My point is, all companies have incentives to be coercive because of their profit maximising structure.

Apple in the developing world, and Tobacco companies in the developed are just a few examples.

@" I wasn't there and don't know, but generally speaking, there was too much of most things and that was the problem. "

Yes, the ability to supply goods outstripped the ability of customers to pay for those goods. The economy was failing to provide employment for the people who needed to work in order to survive because the cost of production dropped drastically due to industrialization - there was a multiplier effect, where the amount of good producible dramatically increased between 1912 and 1930. But without people to buy the goods (they still needed them) the economy collapsed.

Thus it was failing to do the thing it was invented for. And a similar effect occurred in 2008 (but due to new financial products, not new industrial production) and the states decided that they wouldn't let a repeat of the great depression occur.

@"So, while the Fed itself didn't cut the money supply, they re the ones in charge of it and failed to take measures to counteract the decreases they were seeing. They were not doing anything malicious, they just did not understand how bad the effects of not keeping the money supply steady would be."

The fear of course was for the gold standard, and how the money supply would affect the international exchange rates - with gold flowing out of the US being a problem if they wished to maintain the gold standard, and over supply of the money supply an issue which had recently caused hyper-inflation in the Wiemar Republic just a few years previously (though that may have had other causes...)