starcraftzzz
Senior Member
- Feb 14, 2012
- 2,263
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I didnt narrow the list of options to the things I could list 30 years ago no one (or very few) people thought about a cap-and-trade system. But I guess you link taxes and regulations preventing hoarding to shit like killing people...etc etc etc
That's the part I'm worried about.
So you are saying government has zero reason to prevent distortions in market prices, economic bubbles, and actions that result in people being pushed into poverty. Did you not consider those things or are you serious?People are free to make purchases they hope will appreciate in value. There is zero reason for the government to interfere with that process.
History, evidence, research, logic Some speculation such as hedging (IE insuring) is beneficial because in some markets there can be unexpected external factors that cause the price to plummet. So without this hedging/insuring many people will go bankrupt due to things they had no control in. Furthermore this insuring lessens the creation of bubbles because it evens out wild fluctuations that do not affect long term trends....government could do many different things such as limit speculation to activities that are actually beneficial
Who gets to determine that? Why don't you tell us what makes some speculation "beneficial" and other not.
Some speculation is bad because it issimply mass purchases of an item so that one can hoard it; causing distortions in market prices in order to sell it off when there are inflated prices. This causes economic bubbles because it pushes up prices even though there is already adequate supply. Furthermore it also wastes money because you have buy storage for a bunch of goods that would otherwise not need stored. There are plenty examples of this happening such as Garlic in China.
Furthermore speculation is worsened if there is a group who has a monopoly or if there is a group rich enough to purchase a large market share of the goods (This is because a group that is very rich can purchase a vast majority of the goods, and hoard them) or if there are enough speculators (of which over 50% of oil purchases are via speculators)