This is one of the many reasons that interfering in an economy to prevent "recessions" is a bad idea. It prolongs the problem and worsens the inevitable side effects.
"Market corrections" might be less of a tragedy if societies like the USA could muster the moral courage to pick up the slack for the market and make people's lives not literally depend on it.
Looking after people who can't look after themselves - be it for reasons of market correction, injury or infirmity - is an entirely orthogonal concern.
In other words yes, I agree with you - but think that picking up the slack is the job of charity, and shouldn't involve interference with the market just because it's giving you prices you don't like.
The market exists for us, we don't exist for the market. If distortions are all that's needed to make sure we have the society we want, then that's great! Nothing inherently just about a market.
Gravity makes things fall, but it doesn't mean that we let everything crash to the ground because we don't want to mess with the laws of physics.
And we are also the folks who create the market - deliberately or not. Its our collective decisions which results in corrections. We need a safety net for the people - the jobs however, are lost for the rest of eternity.
There's no need to let people suffer because the market has judged their labour now to be worthless. That's what charitable support is for.
But arguing that we shouldn't let the market deem someone's labour worthless is like arguing that we shouldn't let physics determine g to be 9.8ms2.
It is 9.8ms2, just like the value of a skilled buggy whip maker is now $0/hr.
The question in both cases is, now what do we do about it? Presumably, we give to charity to support the buggy whip makers, and we build our buildings such that gravity doesn't cause them to come crashing down.
This is fundamentally the reason I (cynically) cannot trust charities (especially religious charities) long-term. The charity machinery requires people to be poor and miserable. Poor and miserable people are the products a charity sells (to donors)! We are the product. A charity is a band-aid. It cannot be as long-term infrastructure.
I agree that we should not prop up failing industries for fear of layoffs. That's just kicking the can down the road. However, I strongly believe a charity has no place in a functioning society.
If you're opposed to charity but also opposed to market manipulation, how do you propose to support people who can't support themselves?
The only alternative is forcing people to do it.
Yes, this is a pretty common position: govt charity funded by taxes is precisely forced charity, which many people are in favor of (myself included).
Yes, I know. I thought my meaning was obvious, but I'll be clearer: "Forcing" people to provide an alternative to charity is simply called "taxation" (to the extent that taxes are spent on things whose benefits are not distributed in proportion to taxation).
My point was that I don't understand your claim that you don't follow the GP comment's point, since you're surely aware that taxation and gov't spending are well within the Overton Window.
It's simply a collective action problem, in which there's a global equilibrium that is effectively unreachable (outside of legislation, which has its own complications in the case of advertising because of 1A protections).
Advertising isn't a crazy form of mind control where people are hypnotised into handing over money. Sure that might happen, but the vast majority of people I've met don't know they have a problem until it is pointed out to them.
For example, in '07 I didn't find out about smartphones by word of mouth. I found out because Apple put a lot of effort into some very effective marketing. And there is pretty good evidence that the advertising industry is one facet of a larger apparatus developed to make sure that messages make it to the local word-of-mouth circles.
I see so little advertising these days that I don't care at all anymore.
And it seems like advertising is yet another industry (alongside payment processors, legal services, and real estate) that have managed to 'insert themselves' in the middle of all other commerce, skimming vastly outsized portions of profit off of the entire economy, by being intrinsically 'needed' to do business.
It seems to me that all of these things should be driven by competition to infinitesimal profit margins, because everyone needs them and there should be a big payoff in undercutting each other to take everyone else's business. In practice that's not true at all, which I think means that 'everyone else' severely lacks high-level bargaining power to force these industries down to reasonable cuts.
I fantasize about a scandal in which it emerges that click-through rates all lies and advertising barely actually works and the whole industry goes belly-up as a result.
... okay that's enough cynicism for today.