Comment by rland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rland | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is actually a great way of looking at it.

Patagonia here is the exception, that's why we're all here talking about it!

I didn't want to give my bit of power to my health insurer, but guess what, I have to have healthcare to live and there's effectively one local hospital I can choose.

I didn't want to give my ~~~bit~~~ hefty chunk of power to the company that gatekeeps the patent on insulin, but I really didn't have much choice on that one.

I didn't want to give my bit of power to the telecom conglomerate, but did I have a choice? I need to be online to participate in today's society.

I didn't want to give my bit of power to Google, but... uhh actually I didn't give it to them, they stole it by spying on me.

The reality is that concentrations of power that are inherent to our system of free exchange inevitably congeal into something that looks a lot less free. All of these examples (and there are so many, most of our economy is like this!) don't really represent individual value functions, because when power gets concentrated enough, it becomes possible to take choice away.

Health insurance and medical care are all highly regulated industries with exceptionally high cost of entry; one could call it a broken market. It's not competitive at all. I always marvel at how much better the whole experience is when I take my dog to the vet than when I myself go see a doctor, and can't help but wonder if there wasn't so much state intervention (or even just wiser intervention) in medicine, my experience would be different.

Forms of insulin for which the patent has expired are affordable. The stuff under patent is expensive but objectively better at its job. One could argue that the forms in between (patent recently expired but not widely available as generics in the market) are again due to the result of onerous regulations keeping competition out of that market.

Telecommunications, at least the hardwired kind, is a natural monopoly and I wish some smarter incentive-structuring would take place in that market; maybe public ownership of the infrastructure with competitive private service providers operating on top of it. Wireless is generally more competitive and you can actually be online for less money than you think.

I'm not sure what your point was about Google? You certainly don't have to use their services.

I didn't want to seem long winded, but the market structures you describe are common to many if not most markets we have for goods and services, at least here in the US.

For example:

Food, agriculture, energy, media (print/radio/movies/home video), most commodities, productive inputs... there is little that you can buy that is not part of what I would loosely call a "conglomerate" -- that is, a concentration of capital so large and intense that it tends to influence the markets in which it operates. In fact, markets are today less competitive than they have ever been.

Those things that are (I would argue, seem) "competitive" here, like fashion, consumer products, and the like, are frequently as or more exploitative and influence markets (specifically, labor markets) abroad, up to and including slavery. Just because we don't feel that pain doesn't mean others are free of it.

This is because we have done nearly nothing, culturally, politically, economically, or psychologically, to stop the movement of power -- just as you described -- out of the hands of the many people and into the hands of the few entities that control such markets.

The free market, where each individual has the power of their dollar, is delicate indeed. Much more delicate than we have appreciated in the last several decades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com