Skip to main content

Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

Sacrifices & Rock & Roll

Sor­ry: eng­lish on­ly be­cause my kbd is act­ing up an typ­ing is a chore.


Here I am, writ­ing in a place of evil so deep they charge you $56 (that's pe­sos) for a tiny sand­wich and a bot­tle of wa­ter: the Gi­an­ni & Vit­to­rio café at Cór­do­ba Air­port.

It's like Mor­dor, ex­cept the wa­ter is kin­da-­sor­ta-s­light­ly-­cold, and I car­ry no rings. And there is very lit­tle la­va. But the evil... the evil is dense, as it can on­ly be at air­port­s, Mi­nas Morgul, and per­haps the choripán place near Lisan­dro de la Torre sta­tion (which I strong­ly rec­om­mend).

But why do I do it? Be­cause I have al­ready failed. I will not post ev­ery­day this year. I may not even be close. But I will post as much as I can. And I prom­ise it won't be filler about why I did not do a re­al post.

So, on­to the meat of this post we go.

It's in­evitable that air­ports will have ex­pen­sive and bad food. It will be ex­pen­sive be­cause there are a lim­it­ed num­ber of sell­er­s, and get­ting to be one of them is ex­pen­sive. Since they can charge what­ev­er they wan­t, they have no in­cen­tives to pro­vide qual­i­ty or ser­vice.

Plus, they own a cap­tive cus­tomer base, since you are locked there, and there is no place to go out­side the air­port eti­her.

That is clas­sic gov­ern­men­t-­man­dat­ed mar­ket dis­tor­tion, with the air­port man­age­ment as the gov­ern­men­t, and you play­ing the role of you. This kind of clear ex­am­ples are good be­cause they show cap­i­tal­ism and free mar­ket ad­vo­cates ac­tu­al­ly have a de­cent point when they re­mark on the de­fects of im­per­fect mar­ket­s.

OTO­H, I don't see any com­mu­nists around here op­press­ing me, I see on­ly hap­py cap­i­tal­ists tak­ing my mon­ey.

PS: it seems there was a tor­na­do here to­day.

Lucio / 2012-01-31 01:00:

Maybe it just a decent point in life, as it seems that the conditions for a perfect market will never be met by us lowly humans.

"""In economics, a perfect market is defined by several conditions, collectively called perfect competition. Among these conditions are
Perfect market information
No participant with market power to set prices
No barriers to entry or exit
Equal access to production technology"""


Contents © 2000-2024 Roberto Alsina