Ask HN: Ideas either implemented or proposed historically to level playing field

I'm sorry, but your post is impossible to grok.

- What do you mean by "the economy" treating a business a certain way?

- You use the sentence "Specifically around raw material consumption and/or other commodities such as energy prices, and even human resources, etc." -- what did you actually intend that sentence fragment to say?

- You say "I would imagine the formula would be based on how many standard deviations from the mean or median a given company was" -- what formula? That's the first time you bring up the idea of some kind of formula.

- You say "based on statistical polling of consumers and/or other businesses it's likely the wealth would be distributed evenly enough" -- woah, what wealth distribution? This is the first time you bring up this topic.

In fifteen or fewer words, what is your proposal?

Basically instead of the government being the middle man, businesses become (by law) responsible for at least some of redistribution of wealth within the economy.

The premise, fundamentally, is that wealth (re)distribution is likely required to "level the playing field".

I'll comment separately for each question to keep the ideas clear:

Raw materials / human resources are the building blocks of an economy. Without them nothing else can happen. So by requiring company A to charge company B more than they charge company C for these things (because company B has 1 million times more revenue than company C) it prevents collusion between large entities. Large companies are notorious for "picking winners" in an economy just like large powerful governments are.

So with regards to the "formula", it's kind of the same idea as "tax tables" the IRS creates. But instead of telling us "how much taxes you owe" these other tables decide "how much MORE energy prices are for the largest companies in the world vs the smallest".

So the government isn't receiving the money before it's "distributed". Instead the "pain threshold" ultimately becomes too great for one company (as they get bigger and bigger) to own everything that they become forced to "distribute responsibility" to other companies that aren't all controlled by the same small group of people.

The "statistical polling" idea is really just acknowledging the fact that a government (if they put something like this into law) would then of course be required to "uphold that law". So it's just my way of explaining that I think it's FEASIBLE for a government to not only put something like this into law, I think a government could probably enforce it reasonably well.

I'm sorry, but you are making it very difficult to follow your train of thought. If you don't want to answer direct clarifying questions, that's fine, but a refusal to answer questions is generally not a sign of trustworthiness. Good luck.

This is a dialogue my friend. I don't know what prior knowledge you're bringing to the table so I don't know ahead of time how to explain myself. By interacting and asking questions and me answering (and vice-versa) we can hopefully come closer to understanding one another. I'm not trying to dismiss your questions. I probably just need more from you in order to know how to answer them.

EDIT: And that's not to say I'm necessarily "right" about any of what I'm talking about. It's just an idea, and sometimes ideas can be a little complex and nuanced, which can make them even more difficult to explain.

First and foremost, are we talking about equality of opportunity, or equality of outcome?

Secondly, addressing inequality of unevenness of the playing field through organizations or corporations is still at least one level removed from actual humans.

Milton Friedman proposed the Negative Income Tax, a gradual inclined ramp out of poverty similar to modern-day calls for UBI. I wrote about a possible variant called GPI (Guaranteed Progressive Income) here: https://satisologie.substack.com/p/guaranteed-progressive-in...

Government mints money, government also collects taxes on minted money. We take this as a necessary truth, but is it not a little redundant? Some people question the effectiveness of taxation. I don't think the alternatives to taxation are explored much if at all. Maybe there are slim pickings as far as promising ideas in that direction go.

So your suggestion, if I understand it, is to tier businesses for tax purposes, similar to the idea of a progressive tax but for business entities? Yeah, we could do that, would that alter outcomes somehow? It seems like education is the main barrier, and the more people are aware of interdependence the more intelligent our buying and funding decisions will be.

I advocate for a documented progeny for where raw materials and produce come from. If one could see a latitude and longitude for where an apple came from before one bought it, or the conditions that led to its being harvested, then one would be able to make more resource-friendly decisions at the point of purchase.

However, I think that we are talking about altering human behavior to make things less toxic and more harmonious on our planet, yet the basic necessities of hunger, thirst, shelter, clothing, and medicine are somewhat immutable in the large-scale, and therefore our focus ought be to address these inflexible (inelastic) demands as a matter of priority, then everything else will fall into place.

I kind of feel like our focus historically has been around equality of opportunity. That (to me) feels like, at least partially, the wrong way to look at it. Unless science comes to the conclusion that there is in fact some super human species then equality of outcome should already be happening if equality of opportunity is truly already happening.

I like your ideas. I'm not that familiar but thank you for pointing me to these things. I will look into them.

I agree that education is an important barrier, but the people who need that education spend all of their time trying to make ends meet. They probably ultimately fall out of love with the idea that anything in their life is destined to change.

Also, just to mention, I think you understood my premise. Taking government out as the middle man on at least some of the responsibility for wealth (re)distribution.

This idea sounds like an authoritarian nightmare. You are talking about essentially allowing the government to control the flow of resources in the economy. This system would cause everyone to be "poorer". By this I mean, the average products in the economy would be more expensive and of worse quality. The opposite of what happens in the free market. The key to making everyone richer is the let the free market do its thing. If you look at products that have little government involvement, product quality and prices have both improved exponentially. Look at the prices for flat screen tvs and smart phones compared to what they were 10 years ago. Now look at industries with heavy government involvement, i.e. healthcare and education. The prices have skyrocketed and the quality hasn't improved much.

I'm making an assumption on what the OP is thinking but most people who propose similar things are asking a similar question. "How in a country as rich as the US does poverty exist?" This this the wrong question. Poverty will always exist. It is the base state of humans and has been the most common state throughout history. If you do nothing you will be in poverty. Therefore the question we need ask and solve is, "If poverty is the basic state of humanity, how does wealth exist?" The answer to this question is by providing value to other people. The more value your provide, the more wealthy you become. So to make a level playing field, we need to make it as easy as possible for people to provide value to others. This means lowering taxes to make it easier for people to start and run businesses and lowering the regulatory burden on those businesses.

Let's see if I understand:

* Companies are put into revenue tiers.

* The price for any good/service paid by a company is increased by some TBD formula.

* Roughly speaking, the formula chosen would mean that companies in higher revenue tiers pay more.

* Then survey companies/consumers that interact with a company to determine if that company is following the rules.

* Plus a rule to forbid playing shell games with companies you own.

If that's all in the ballpark of what you where trying to communicate, here are my immediate thoughts:

* Based on the "into the economy" instead of taxes angle, I'm assuming the intent is for the premium paid still goes to the company selling the good/service. I suspect this could end up incentivizing a pricing structure like the one we see in US medicine where insurance companies negotiate that they'll pay some discounted amount to the hospital, but the hospital just raises the line item cost a commensurate amount so they end up being paid what they originally wanted to. Only it'd be large companies will purchase from companies who agree to negotiate a price that after adding the legally mandated premium, ends up being what they wanted to pay anyway. Of course the selling company will be fine with this because it means business from a large company.

* Using surveys to determine compliance creates a perverse incentives to poison the surveys of your competitors. Even without such laws we already see that happen with Amazon reviews. Companies pay to have negative reviews placed on their competitors products.

* I'll suggest a possible negative conservative viewpoint: Manipulating an independent company's pricing by legal mandate in some new way is regulatory overreach.

* If disallowing self-ownership of multiple companies based on some rules were enough to stop collusion, we'd have solved it years ago. If I can't own it myself, I'll pay someone to own it, and have them follow my orders. This is well within the borders of what the SEC already deals with, only they deal with way more complicated versions of it. For example, the loophole du jour is SPACs. SEC says that both companies involved in a merger must meet certain requirements. Those requirements can be inconvenient for an existing company to meet (audits take time and money), so instead create a brand new company, which you control in practice, that's squeaky clean from the SEC's standpoint and have THAT company make the actual purchase. That's a Special Purpose Acquisition Company.

The takeaway I think is that ultimately, trying to regulate financial behavior directly is a losing game full of unintended consequences. It's all about (dis)incentives.

Subsidies incentivize. Taxes disincentivize. Everything will be gamed to the nth degree.

So, I agree that in today's economic climate it likely would be difficult to work well initially. However, I think that's mostly because (at least from my perspective) we all KNOW today that the largest corporations in the world have already won. At least on the current economic playground.

So I think one thing I didn't explain was that I believe that a particular type of phenomenon would "arise" from a structure like I've proposed.

For example, at small scale Bitcoin (for all intents and purposes) is worthless due to things like the "51% attack". But at a large enough scale, where enough people are standing firmly on their own two feet, fewer and fewer people are subject to the whims of some "elite class". The reasoning then follows that the more soundly something like this was regulated the more difficult it becomes for an elite class to exist let alone manipulate everything.

What I think also here is (from my perspective) an insight into human nature. That insight tells me that, by nature when people aren't forced or leverage doesn't exist to coerce people to comply, the manipulation will exponentially decrease as fewer and fewer people see it as a necessity to survive.

As it becomes exponentially more difficult to be greedy, I think greedy people will start to be far less greedy.

You come across as underestimating the scale of the economy and the lengths people already go to in the name of greed today.

You speak about regulation as though it's some new idea. It's not. There's oodles of regulation, layered over a few centuries of people gaming and exploiting the system and the system coming up with new ways to identify and stop it. People are more clever than you give them credit for and are more likely to simply game the system you describe to leverage things even more.

You say by making it harder to be greedy people will stop being greedy. I say it's more likely they'll find new ways of being greedy before they give it up. Then you're back to square one, but with a more complex system that costs more to simply maintain the status quo.

I think it's less about underestimating and more about finding the right abstractions and trade-offs. As far as I understand all the real debate is surrounded by "more taxes" vs "less taxes". No major debate is really trying to think of fundamentally different trade offs.

Some people may interpret it as a naive point of view. I don't think that's the case.

The "layers" of regulation I think could possibly be likened to a legacy code-base that has accumulated patches on top of patches on top of patches. But in reality the problem isn't that that was necessary. In reality maybe the original code kinda sucked or had a few malicious patches injected over the years (ie. case law, supreme court decisions, etc)

> As far as I understand all the real debate is surrounded by "more taxes" vs "less taxes". No major debate is really trying to think of fundamentally different trade offs.

No, it is not. Its mostly between "More Taxes" vs "More Regulations". USA is light on taxes but heavy in regulations. Instead of the government levying a tax in order to pay for unemployment they enacted a law forcing companies to pay for unemployment. Similarly instead of the government using taxes to pay for healthcare they forced companies to pay for healthcare.

Other countries in the world doesn't have as heavy handed regulations forcing companies to provide services to employees and instead the government just takes money and uses that money to achieve similar results.

OH, also...

Sorry, I missed it originally. Not 100% sure if this is what you mean, but I'm not necessarily talking about "price manipulation". A company is free to charge whatever they want. BUT, they would have to adjust (relatively speaking) pricing among the different tiers of companies they do business with.

SO, if they only want to do business with large companies they'd have to create a structure where their pricing was both (a) out of reach to smaller companies, AND (b) compliant with the relative pricing structure. Ultimately I see a pain threshold arising from a model like this where "cutting out" small companies just won't be an option.

Just because it's a relative scale doesn't make it not price manipulation. If a company would prie things one way, but the law says they must change the price, you're manipulating their pricing.

You can argue the benefits of doing so, but you can't argue that's not what you are doing.

It seems maybe I don't have a refined enough vocabulary to express what I'm thinking. Would you consider taxes, or laws in general, price manipulation? It seems to be pretty loosely defined what we're talking about.

I'm not disagreeing that the definition may mean all the things we're talking about, but I see nuance and an entire spectrum of things that are different but maybe technically called price manipulation.

From a quick glance online it seems "price manipulation" has more to do with fraud, and not laws.

Laws that influence prices by altering incentives are not price manipulation. Laws that say "Hey, those prices you've set? Yeah, you can't do that, change them." Is price manipulation. I've called the thing you've suggested price manipulation, because the price of X to one tier necessarily influences the price of X to another tier (smaller companies get a better deal, which was your goal).

Changing a price in one spot necessarily impacts price in another. It limits the ability for a company to set its own prices arbitrarily, in fact, that's the whole point. I'm using the term "price manipulation" in its literal sense.

A sales tax doesn't quite fall under this because if a company wants to sell at $Y, but sales tax is assessed, the can choose to reduce the item price to hit a customer facing price of $Y. The point of your idea is to limit the price that can be offered in specific circumstances.

In my original post, I didn't use the phrase "price manipulation", I said that a potential negative view taken by a conservative could be "Manipulating an independent company's pricing by legal mandate in some new way is regulatory overreach.". And I stand by the idea that that could still be a negative view taken by a conservative to argue against your proposal. I'm not personally saying that it's a bad idea, I'm providing a balancing thought against your suggestion that it was unlikely to be viewed negatively from a conservative viewpoint.

Found some reading which seems to help explain the role of government in commodity prices.

https://www.nios.ac.in/media/documents/SecEcoCour/English/Ch...

That's a useful starting point. Thanks for sharing it. I do think that it's only a starting point, implementing real world policies that have the intended effect is a lot harder in practice.

I think I understand your proposal here; the idea is to discourage consumption at the megacorp level, and increase consumption at the small business level?

A couple of thoughts here. Firstly, revenue is a bad way to measure this. Low-margin businesses like groceries will have high revenue for fairly low actual profits. It will benefit companies that have high profit margins. Google has high profit margins and will be less impacted than a grocery company of equivalent size.

Secondly, this will discourage economies of scale. The prices of goods will likely rise, because megacorps pay more for raw materials and small businesses are fairly inefficient for the most part. It would be hard to run a small business making cars, for example. Not big enough to afford all the expensive automation.

Third, I would worry that all this causes is an expensive to audit shell game. You create lots of small companies that funnel their income to a parent company. The only thing the parent company does is hold IP, which they lease to the small companies for a rate that is almost exactly their profit margins. The parent company has no need for raw materials (as R&D can be done in a small subsidiary funded by 0% interest loans from the parent company), so the tiering does nothing. Or we have to prevent that somehow, which likely means lots of complicated audits on how businesses are structured.

As for prior examples, Communism was a fairly different attempt to level the playing field (at least ideologically). It went poorly, but for reasons that I don't think impact your idea.

I think you're coming in at the wrong angle. To me, large corporations make sense in a lot of fields. One example is how Amazon got big enough that they had organically needed many of the underpinnings that led to AWS. Their economy of scale makes it possible to sell those services for profit, but not be outrageously expensive relative to doing it yourself for many cases.

The problem is that the way we structure companies leads to an extremely unequal distribution of the company's returns. One proposed solution has been to cap the maximum pay of anyone at the company based on the pay of the lowest paid person. So if it was theoretically 10x, if the janitor makes $7.25/hr then the CEO can't make more than $72.50/hr. If the CEO wants to make more, they'll have to raise the janitors pay. Of course, that's not without faults either. If they contract for janitorial services, then the lowest paid person might be an engineer. You also have to watch for alternative transfers of wealth; i.e. if the CEO owns the janitorial services company that they use, overcharges for it, and the board allows it as a form of kickback.

I personally like that because it doesn't prevent the CEO from making money, it just requires them to lift up everyone else as well to do it.