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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

You don't fix races to the bottom by individual action.

This is exactly how you do it! If everyone is encouraged to take responsibility and make a good life for them and their family, a society will improve massively.

If you run a company that produces something, but your competitor undercuts your prices by half because they don't pay taxes, dump their waste in a river and hire children, you doing all things right will have absolutely zero impact on fixing the situation. You will be priced out of the market because you can't possibly compete with someone who has lower costs through illegal actions. Again, the answer is regulation, not hoping that people will behave morally and decently out of the goodness of their hearts.

The answer can sometimes be -good- regulation. But another solution would be to employ a skin in the game approach. If a company behaves in this way, they will be sued to the heavens, therefore discouraging this kind of behavior.

Besides, the way the regulatory system works now, new regulations only seem to benefit large corporations who can afford to lobby and get around the regulations. They actively hurt small businesses.

Companies have no family and making a good life for themselves means externalizing as many costs as possible on society. You might enjoy skimming this very long essay https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...

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