I considered that. It's a fair point, there are things that you couldn't give away, but almost always somebody would want them, if the price was zero. Hard bread, for example, would become like a natural resource, full of calories, to be turned into nicer bread.
Which part? You see this depends on your prior assumptions about how much stock there should be, and those are based on the state of affairs that you're used to and that you consider to be the natural order of things. But if you imagine that the proper natural order of things is for everybody to have as much of everything as they like, to squander profligately, then there's always a shortage of everything, relative to that state. On the other hand, if you consider the natural order of things to be that hard bread is very expensive, then raising the price (to stop it being too cheap) would indeed remove the shortage. You see? I'm saying that declaring a shortage is a kind of mild Chauvinism, an assumption that what you're used to having is proper and correct. But of course that might be true, in a way.
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It implies no such thing.
The presence of a price "selects who can access it", hence there's not enough stock to give it away for free. (Sometimes deliberately.)
There’s plenty of stuff you couldn’t get rid of if you gave it away for free. You seem to be ignoring demand.
I considered that. It's a fair point, there are things that you couldn't give away, but almost always somebody would want them, if the price was zero. Hard bread, for example, would become like a natural resource, full of calories, to be turned into nicer bread.
Wut? That makes no sense.
Which part? You see this depends on your prior assumptions about how much stock there should be, and those are based on the state of affairs that you're used to and that you consider to be the natural order of things. But if you imagine that the proper natural order of things is for everybody to have as much of everything as they like, to squander profligately, then there's always a shortage of everything, relative to that state. On the other hand, if you consider the natural order of things to be that hard bread is very expensive, then raising the price (to stop it being too cheap) would indeed remove the shortage. You see? I'm saying that declaring a shortage is a kind of mild Chauvinism, an assumption that what you're used to having is proper and correct. But of course that might be true, in a way.