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Comment by hamandcheese | Hacker News Reader

"Imagine if there was a different speed limit depending on if you were driving to McDonalds or to Burger King"

"Imagine if you always had to follow the same speed limit no matter whether you were driving to McDonalds or to the hospital"

in what jurisdiction is it legal to speed due to a medical emergency ?

Might not be explicitly legal, but chances are it'd go like this:

Police: Sir, do you know what speed you were going?

Driver: Yes, my wife is in the back and she's about to go into labor.

Police: Let me turn on my lights and escort you to the hospital!

To which the reply will be:

"If Burger King pays someone to enable me to get there faster, then that's cool!"

(devil's advocate)

How about if the road company threatened to put speed bumps on the roads unless the restaurant companies paid to not have them installed, and Burger King paid but McDonalds didn't? Oh, and you already paid the road company a toll to use the road to drive to the restaurants in the first place.

That's much better.

But now the reply could be:

"The customer is free to choose a different road company. And the road company is free to choose its business model. The free market will decide which road company offers the best price/performance ratio in the end."

(again, devil's advocate)

But in the US the average consumer doesn't have a meaningful choice between road companies: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/09/most-of-the-us-has-n...

This is the heart of it. Free market economics is a wonderful thing and as a civilization we have reaped enormous rewards from it, I'm a true believer, but if your market produces natural monopolies that are highly stable then that's not really a market anymore and it's certainly not free or fair.

Adam Smith, the father of free market economics, was very clear about this. Markets must be well regulated in order to remain free and fair.

thats not devil's advocate as much as it is a "racketeering advocate" [1].

[1] Racketeering, often associated with organized crime, is the act of offering of a dishonest service (a "racket") to solve a problem that wouldn't otherwise exist without the enterprise offering the service.

And because roads are expensive, there is only one. If you don't like it you just have to fly your helicopter to McDonalds instead. The market works!

I like it.

I was thinking "What if gas stations could charge you based in the car you drove, and asked car companies to pay these 'fees'?"

Customer: "These two cars are basically the same price, but if I go with the Honda I get $0.25 off per gallon. Cool, let's go with that one."

But what if the Honda now costs more or has less features?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com