I withdraw my emoji.

My original post, at the top of this thread, wasn't about supply and demand, it was about how businesses don't use their own assets to finance expansion, they borrow instead. My throw away line at the very end was just a nod to our former discussion of LoS&D we had some time ago.

However, the swiftness and ferocity of your rebuttal reveals much more was at stake here than just a discussion of abstract economic theory. It was more like what artillerymen call "a secondary explosion". You know, you fire one round at the enemy's ammo dump and you get a set of detonations that last all day. To use another metaphor, it looks like I, inadvertently, hit a nerve.

When people of good conscience can't help but notice the pain and suffering caused by the greed of those who wield economic power, they will grasp at any explanation that lets their entrepreneurial heroes off the hook, that explains financial bullying and indifference, and crime, as simply the result of impersonal laws of economics and finance. If true evil is involved, it is just because of a few bad actors, not the result of a system that incentivizes it. These laws, like Supply and Demand, do indeed exist, but their use in a social or moral context ignores the fact that economics is a human activity. It is not like electricity or gravity or thermodynamics, a property of matter and energy interacting in space and time. It governs the relations between human beings, without humanity it would be meaningless.

The Law of Supply and Demand does not cause the exploitation or oppression of the poor at the hands of the rich. It is USED by the rich to exploit the poor because they have the resources and the influence to manipulate both supply AND demand. The oppression is not even necessarily deliberate, its often just the unavoidable consequence of doing business. Its built into the system, If you fling babies off a tall building, you can't blame gravity for their grisly death when they hit the street. Yes, there is a Law of Supply and Demand, a phenomenon that explains the mechanism of how prices are related to the ratio of supply to demand, and to a certain extent, the effect can even be quantified with mathematical functions and curves on graphs. No one, not even Marx, ever denied that. I certainly don't.

But this "Law" does not operate in a moral vacuum, it can be manipulated and "gamed" ( to use the modern vernacular) by those with the wealth and resources to politically control trade. So whenever I hear something like "insulin prices are higher because of supply and demand", or "rising grain prices are causing famine in Ethiopia", or the potato blight in Ireland starved or forced into exile half the population, even though Ireland was exporting surplus grain to England, then I'm inclined to think there are things other than "blind, impersonal, economic laws" at work here. And when I hear how these abstract economic theorems are used to justify economic crime, how those crimes are only the unavoidable consequences, the natural properties of the financial cosmos, then I know someone is trying to fool me.

And when I find that otherwise decent, good people find my viewpoint personally threatening, then I know they are fooling themselves.