Quote:
Originally Posted by din155
How is cheaper books for me is a short term individual advantage but harmful for society. For me, a penny saved on a book is a penny available for another book or something else. Please explain how am doing any harm to society if I want cheaper books.
din
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I don't know where you are, but where I live about half the shops in the town centre are boarded up. Most of the remaining ones are either chainstores or bargain/2nd hand shops. That's where "increasing competition" always ends up — with the number of competitors diminishing.
You end up with most of the consumer money going to large multinationals who dodge their taxes in order to cut prices. And then taxes need to rise for everyone else to make up for the shortfall from all the businesses who used to pay their taxes before they closed down. So in real terms it ends up costing more than it used to before you let it happen.
Then there's the people who can't physically get to the large out of town stores, or don't have a computer to get what they need on the internet. "Society" includes all of those people too.