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Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

in a market the search for profit is the search for more efficiently serving aggregate preferences of consumers. allowing corporations to assume disproportionate control of the political process is almost assuredly a net improvement.

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That's clearly false. A really simple example is antitrust legislation - if MS (or any other monopolistic organisation) were able to remove regulation on monopolies, you can be assured that they would, and that the effect on our society would be dramatically negative.

I don't know if it's "clearly false". Anti-trust/anti-competitive business practices are an area that personally make me uncomfortable but again, here too, companies are having increasingly difficult control over maintaining dominance if they don't provide the best products/services and focus instead on trying to suppress competitors (e.g. browser wars, high end computers - apple v pcs). I'd also be pretty uncomfortable with governments making the determination of what's "good" and "bad" as there have been some bizarre anti-trust rulings over the past few decades.

Here's Cato's take on anti-trust: http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-39.html

Even the Economist has clearly argued that being "pro-business' is not the same thing as being "pro-market".

Besides, I don't agree with you, because it doesn't take into account externalities. When "efficiency" takes the form of polluting the river because someone else will clean it up, it most assuredly is not a net improvement.

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