Head in the sand my dude. Canadian groceries were caught red handed colluding on bread price fixing.

Yes, I am aware there are cartels and other anticompetitive practices. I said as much in a comment on Lemmy not long ago - with some detective work you may be able to find it.

Companies charge as much as they can get away with and will always push the numbers higher. They’re not eating costs outbid the goodness of their heart, loss-leaders lead to more spending.

Obviously. And what they can get away with is profit margins up to a certain limit (assuming no monopolies, and at least moderately effective anti-cartel measures), that limit being the point where it becomes easy to enter the market or undercut a competitor, gain massive market share, and still make a lot of money.

They cannot get away with just endlessly taking all profits from productivity gains. These gains have been enormous since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and in most markets profits are on the order of a few percent of turnover, if that.

How does it work? Why don’t supermarkets just ask a million for a loaf of bread? More money and profits, right?

Now, I am aware there are cartels and other anticompetitive practices, but no single supermarket chain has a monopoly. There is competition, the margins in the business really are not that high, and supermarkets can and do lower prices to attempt to increase their market share. In fact, for products like bread supermarkets often deliberately sell them at a loss.

Would supermarkets like to put the savings of self-checkout in their own pocket? Absolutely. Can and will they, on the long term? No. If businesses would always pocket such savings, then margins in the entire economy should tend upward over time, and they simply don’t.

Do you use horse-drawn carriages? No? What about the horse breeders and cartwrights?

[…] is making customers do the job of paid employees for free.

So if everyone used self-checkout, groceries would be cheaper…

Well, the latter two points would be good advice for American tourists in Europe anywhere.

I really don’t need to hear what you’re saying from 100 metres away.

I don’t know where you get the idea that I would “cover for billionaires.” I support higher taxes on billionaires. Heck, I support higher taxes on myself, and I’m only a 9%-er.

While it’s true billionaires use fiscal tricks to avoid taxes, it’s an oversimplification to claim they have “no income.”

But the main thing you’re missing is that most Western democracies have only a handful of billionaires, and they are typically far less politically active than US billionaires (some exceptions notwithstanding). This is because bribing politicians is actually banned or at least fairly restricted in most of these democracies. For example, the richest oligarch in Germany, Dieter Schwarz (net worth approx. USD 40 billion), has never even given an interview and stays out of public view. I couldn’t tell you what politicians (if any) he supports.

Once again, you can’t use US-specific concepts or phenomena to explain a trend in all Western democracies.

Stagnant real wage growth, sure. Stagnant, so not significantly worse.

Health care? US-specific - how do you explain the massive growth of fascism in countries with reasonably well-functioning health care systems and universal health care?

Union membership? US-specific - how do you explain the massive growth of fascism in countries with 50%+ union membership rates, massively more politically influential unions and widespread collective wage bargaining?

Minimum wage? US-specific - how do you explain the massive growth of fascism in countries where even the minimum income (i.e., for the unemployed) is far above the US federal minimum wage?

Inequality? A global problem, to be sure. But how do you explain the massive growth of fascism even in countries with dramatically lower inequality, poverty and crime, and with universal access to health care and top-tier education? In fact, some of these countries are among the most egalitarian in human history since the advent of agriculture thousands of years ago.

Why did fascism emerge now as suddenly so much more popular? Could it be, perhaps, not something economic at all, but something else? Like maybe people being bombarded with fascist propaganda 24/7?

By what metric more appropriate for ordinary people has the situation significantly worsened since the 1990s, on average across Western democracies?

The Gini coefficient measures the distribution of incomes in a given economy. If a single individual has all income, then the coefficient is 1, if everyone’s income is equal, then the coefficient is 0.

In fact, in the scenario you’ve sketched, i.e., an individual or small number of individuals hoarding a large share of income, the Gini coefficient would be relatively high.

Not only do many of the aforementioned societies have dramatically lower income inequality (as measured by Gini coefficient) than the US, many furthermore have dramatically lower rates of corruption and judges and government officials are generally not bribed to the same degree. (Case in point: the Toblerone affair.)

However, what these countries very much have in common with the US is that the same social media companies owned by the same assholes are active there, flooding the zone with fascist propaganda.

In fact, the rate of underemployment (gig workers who’d like to work more hours, etc.) is at historically low levels in the US.

I think what you’re missing is that if inequality were a major driver of the popularity of fascism, then how can it be the case that in many Western democracies other than the U.S. the popularity of fascist parties has also boomed? Some of these societies, while far from utopian, are among the most egalitarian in human history. Some have wealth taxes, almost all have far higher top income tax rates than the U.S., all all have dramatically lower levels of inequality.

Media had plenty of rightwing trash before “the 1990s”

Yeah, but unlike today, it wasn’t the dominant way public political debate was held.

It depends on how broadly you interpret “the economy.” The economy is not GDP.

Well, even if we accept (which I don’t) that things like increasing student debt would be a major factor, how do you explain fascism being on the rise in many other (pretty much all of them) Western democracies? You can’t really use US-specific things like medical bankruptcy and student debt as explanations for a trend in societies where these aspects just are not relevant at all. Most Western democracies have universal access to health care and education.

The Fairness Doctrine, however, has clear parallels in other societies. Not because they have legislation similar to it (though some did or still do, like France) - but because even in those places where no such formal legislation exists, social media have almost completely negated the role journalists used to play in moderating public debate from a (relatively) neutral and, more importantly, non-fascist viewpoint.

By which metric is the economy better than the US’s?

By compound broad economic metrics (IHDI, etc.), as well as certain specific metrics like life expectancy, poverty and violent crime rates, income inequality, corruption, and so on.

Did you, in fact, look at real wage growth?

Here is data for the US specifically, which shows modest growth of median real wages over the past decades.

I don’t mean there haven’t been recessions, just that on the whole the economic situation is not significantly worse (and in fact probably somewhat better) than in the 1990s.

The dynamic is quite different around the world.

For one, most other Western democracies have multi-party systems where the choice is not restricted to just moderate conservatives and fascists.

Secondly, many of these democracies where the popularity of fascists has surged are doing much better than the US economically.

Changes in the media landscape. Up to the 1990s, mainstream media in Western democracies were dominated by intellectuals, who are typically against racism and fascism. This gradually changed as media became more commercialized and sensationalist, a change that rapidly accelerated with the advent of social media, which is completely flooded by hate speech.

Economic reasons are often proposed, but this explanation falls flat considering the lack of a significant economic downturn since the 1990s, and the fact that we have seen fascists massively gaining popularity even in societies that are among the most prosperous in human history. This is especially obvious in Germany, where in East Germany (where the fascist strongholds are) the economic situation has in fact dramatically improved since the 90s.

For the time being, it’s still relatively easy for US citizens to move to a prosperous society. If things continue on the current trajectory, then at a certain point waves of refugees will start flowing outward, and with nationalism on the rise globally it’s likely to become more difficult on the medium- to long-term.

Well okay, but:

a) stagflation was a largely global phenomenon;

b) the Americans who remember it are already elderly;

c) policymakers figured out how to deal with the issue in the late 80s.

The American obsession with inflation is interesting, considering the unanimous agreement among those with an above-kindergarten-level understanding of economics that modest inflation of a few percent is generally the optimal state of affairs, for a variety of reasons. (There is a summary on the Wikipedia article on inflation, for those interested.) No reasonable case can be made that inflation ranks among the top 1000 problems in US society or its economy. I say it’s an American obsession, as it’s really not popularly discussed among laymen to the same degree in most other above-average economies.

From an anthropological/sociological perspective, it’s a fascinating question what drives this obsession. I’m not qualified to give an authoritative answer, but I may speculate that weak unions and a lack of collective wage agreements drive job-hopping as a major source of keeping up with inflation. This results in people associating their wage gains with their own career advancement and skills, rather than with inflation causing their own labour costs to increase. On the other hand, when wages are indexed to inflation automatically, at least to a large degree, then people care less about inflation eroding their wages. People perhaps do not have sufficient abstract reasoning skills to realize that when their wages are flat and inflation is a few percent, it’s in fact not so much inflation eroding their wages, but employers actively deciding to cut their real wages.