> Now Porky Pig gets greedy and raises the price of ham to $60. Now you have only $40 to spend on eggs, and (due to the Law of Supply & Demand) the price of eggs declines.

Pull the other one, it's got bells on. Supply and demand is a nice theory, but calling it a law is magical thinking. If I go to the store and say "please sir I'd like to buy eggs but I don't have enough money" they tell me to piss right off, this isn't candyland.

You piss off. And so do all the other customers who don’t have enough. Then the store has all these eggs left over and lowers prices because there’s less demand.

It’s not magic, and it isn’t candy land. But arguing that the law of supply and demand is pretty silly as there’s massive evidence of its existence.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Supply and demand is a great principle but you'll go hungry in the meantime. And if you're just poorer than your neighbors, the grocery store can jack up the price of eggs to cover the ones that spoiled because you couldn't afford them.

Open a grocery store and give it a try.

You mistake me for a person with enough money to open a grocery store.

There are lots of businesses you can start with little to no cash. Try gouging your customers. Let us know how it goes.

Where I live, almost all grocers are owned by one of two umbrella corporations, who appear to coordinate their prices. Similar story for farms.. It takes monopoly power to gouge and get away with it.

Don’t argue with me, argue with reality, https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Supply.html

Don’t mistake your own experience with the entire market.

The market doesn’t care what happens to you. The market cares what happens to everyone. Of course you’ll go hungry. Supply and demand doesn’t determine how much you will pay or if you will eat. It just sets a price and maybe you can afford it and maybe you can’t.

The grocery store can’t jack up the price if people aren’t willing or able to pay that amount. They might stop carrying eggs altogether, but they are more likely to price at whatever the market will bear.

It sounds like you agree that Walter's statement

> Now you have only $40 to spend on eggs, and (due to the Law of Supply & Demand) the price of eggs declines.

was utter bollox

> Supply and demand is a nice theory, but calling it a law is magical thinking

Is it now? Most government failures come from denying the LofS+D exists, or trying to repeal it. It works about as well as that state that passed a law defining pi to be equal to 3.0.

Suppose savings and credit exist. Suppose inflation is quantified as a weighted average of selected goods and services.

Sure but Econ 101 is purely theoretical. De facto what happens is people sell their good car and buy a clunker, they forego vacations, they avoid new purchases, they buy shittier food, they eat out less, they pull their kids out of extracurriculars, they sell their houses, they move to cheaper cities, they go deeper into debt, they pick up extra shifts or extra jobs, etc.

Essentially it's a huge transfer of wealth and economic power to those who need it least from those have very little to begin with. I honestly don't understand any of the arguments in favor of it. Like is Johnson & Johnson using the money to make better baby powder (that doesn't give you cancer) or are they pumping their stock price, collecting bonuses, and prepping for another round of share buybacks?

> they avoid new purchases

Which causes price declines in those purchases. The Law of Supply & Demand.

But it does continue to buoy the prices of things they do purchase. This round of inflation isn't uniform across all goods.

For example: https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/05/share-of-americans-sk...