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Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

In a pure free market, trading by insiders is legal. It used to be that way in the US.

Also, keep in mind that regulation creates insiders of its own. Regulation always degenerates into a weapon of the corrupt.

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In a pure free market, trading slaves and snake oil is legal. It used to be that way in the US.

That's not true. In a free market, the initiation of force is barred by the government, so there is no slavery.

There is no point in arguing against a false representation of someone's view. This is childish and intellectually unhygenic. It's noise.

Snake oil is always legal. It's legal now.

It's actually not. Any product making medical claims is regulated by the FTC under deceptive advertising. https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/statutes/federal-trade-commi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil

By definition, it's impossible to make all snake oil illegal. Think about all the crypto scams. They count. Even if crypto were outlawed, people will always come up with new "snake oil."

This is off topic. Let's drop it.

"don't appreciate this kind of cheap pedantry. Does it feel good"

I think this is extremely unfair, as in your own pedantry seems fine, where you are correct only for very spesific and us-centric definition of 'force' and 'snakeoil'.

You free market people can't even agree if patents and copyright are part of free market. I had one of you tell me that endentured servitude was part of freedom of contract.

You seem to think we should leave snake oil salesmen alone, so it seems free market includes freedom to defraud the customer. Does it also include freedom to defraud the company?

This 'free market' is a spherical cow and would collapse into anarchy from pissed off people shooting each-other, it's no more viable than communism is.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Assuming good faith keeps discussion here at a high level. Let's not descend to strawmen. If you disagree with javert but do not wish to engage the argument, you do not need to respond.

Woah, I don't know about that. I like clean air regulations, clean water, and regulations against children working.

Without regulation we would have a real hellscape.

It turns out you can't trust "the market" to do the right thing - ever.

Do you disagree with something I said in my comment? I cannot see that you do.

Also, frankly, I don't appreciate the sass. It isn't necessary.

I was responding to "Regulation always degenerates into a weapon of the corrupt."

That's an easy target to sass, because it's such an easy target. Did I reply to wrong comment or something? Maybe it's because I'm on mobile. Apologies if I replied to the wrong person.

> In a pure free market, trading by insiders is legal.

Not really. Why can't companies make "no insider trading" as a condition to employment?

They can.

Do you not understand the difference between a rule for employees, and the law?

The problem is that an unregulated free-market economy guarantees monopolies to form, which ironically allows them to use tactics that prevent fair competition. This is why mixed-economies are most efficient, as they take advantage of capitalism while preventing some of the edge cases where capitalism falls apart.

That idea about monopolies is part of the popular economic dogma, but I do not agree at all. In a free market, monopolies are tenuous at best.

Then why were they so frequent and massive prior to stricter regulations?

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