The other vendors don't have to raise the price of tomatoes. They can keep their prices the same and just sell a lot more tomatoes by taking away your customers.

If the entire tomato industry raises prices and people are willing to pay those prices, then those prices are not "artificially high." They're an indication that the previous prices were non-efficiently low and we were overconsuming tomatoes.

In a perfectly competitive market, existing vendors colluding is not inefficient. One vendor having a monopoly isn't even inefficient.

The problem is that those situations probably shouldn't happen in a perfect market. The real market failure is with barriers to entry or something else, not the pricing algorithm.

>Now imagine that scenario, but there is a shortage of tomatoes, and it’s the only thing that anyone is allowed to eat.

This is pointing at the fact that housing should be a public good. Which I agree with. But again the problem is not a pricing algorithm. It's that we value equity more than efficiency for this good and therefore it should not be a private market in the first place.

Yeah, we'll be seeing more and more lawsuits like this.

In this case, I think the massive legal problem RealPage is facing is that allegedly if your rent price deviated from their suggested price, they would call you and pressure you to change it.

At that point, you are effectively in communication with other companies, just with RealPage as an intermediary.

It's not a textbook example of price fixing so long as there is no agreement between competitors.

More information makes the market more efficient. If prices are going up it means rent was artificially low.

And what you should have learned in Econ 101 was that even if these businesses were actually colluding on pricing, it's efficient. They can get together and keep prices high, and in the sane way purchasers can get together and boycott products.

>Religion is something people use to justify their suffering

Exactly. Which is just another way of saying they are searching for meaning. It feels less bad if there is an explanation and purpose for why all of this horrible shit is happening to you, especially if it also comes with a promise that soon the suffering will be over in exchange for an immense payoff in the afterlife.

>I think 99% of them want to be not starving and not be in a war first, lol.

Do they, though? I think there is some truth to the idea of religion being the opiate of the masses. The Catholic church is sitting on billions of dollars. Why don't the people in all the poor Catholic countries simply rise up and overthrow the Pope? And if you look throughout history, there have probably been way more people who have killed other innocent and suffering people or died themselves to protect their religion and religious leaders than tried to overthrow them.

You don’t think someone starving in a war torn country ever thinks about why they are suffering so bad and what is the point of all their pain? There’s a reason why poor people tend to be more religious.

I think that the meaninglessness of the world manifests itself in different ways to people of different income. And that some unfortunate people have physical problems/concerns in addition to metaphysical ones so that you cannot equate the two. But I do think that everyone suffers from the desire for meaning in a meaningless world. That’s a function of merely existing.

>But it’s reason that binds freedom which actually establishes moral rules.

This is a solid enough starting framework. But it's also been the starting framework for thousands of years of Western moral philosophy.

We have choices. We need to decide which of these options is "right" or "just." So let's just use some logical problem-solving. Except that it seems as though "reasonable" people strongly disagree about many things.

So the real question morality is concerned with is when does MY "reason" trump YOUR "freedom?"