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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

But there was no government action here. Dr Seuss's estate made a decision, and EBay reacted to it. A dictatorial government would either prohibit or demand publishing the books. The US government has rightly done nothing.

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The distinction is barely relevant. Megacorporations govern us these days.

Maybe that’s the problem that needs to be addressed here. Because what I’m seeing should be something a libertarian would approve of. The free market at work, eBay is a private company making a decision of how they want to do business. Libertarians should love this.

There is a difference between libertarians who support liberty and "libertarians" who mostly just want there to be less government spending on anything besides military weapons.

Megacorps are starting to think about creating their own currencies (FB diem).

We stumbled into accepting dictatorships in the emerging virtual realms without even realizing it.

It was removed from the recommended reading list by Biden's administration for the "Read Across America" Day [1]. That's not directly related to eBay, unless you've seen the pattern before where "woke twitter mobs and politicians signal distate in X, tech megacorps subsequently take supporting action."

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9318259/White-House...

Removing something from a recommendation list is about as far from censorship as I can possibly imagine.

Nobody claimed otherwise.

True, it's a private, spontaneous witch burning. So much more civilised than places where the witch burning is done by the state.

Yes, this, in earnest. On Beyond Zebra! was a joy of mine growing up. EBay's 'witch burning' have surely breathed new life into these books. Go read it, it's great, its PDF can be found in a few seconds on google.

Market economies allow for stupid mistakes. It really is civilized when the blast radius of such mistakes is "people who get all their books from ebay" instead of "everyone in the country."

“Witch burning”?

Doesn’t this phrase imply that someone is being harmed? Who is being harmed in this case?

The estate that controls the publication rights is deciding not to publish these books, and eBay is deciding not to list the books on its own platform. No one is being penalized or punished, and these entities are acting fully within their rights.

Preventing transactions between two third parties (i.e. ebay) is economically similar to refusing to do business with another party. Except that if your in position to do the latter, you're obviously a platform for others, and thus you have a lot more unilateral power to prevent transactions between arbitrary third parties. Which is probably a lot more economic transactions than the number of transactions you engage in yourself. It's like leverage.

So the harm seems proportional to the harm done by refusing to bake that wedding cake for the gay couple.

Haven't seen a burned witch. I have seen people who have killed minorities because these minorities "might start burning witches and thereby destroy western free speech and civilisation".

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