Comment by pannSun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pannSun | Hacker News Reader

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> There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe.

Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed. Laws covering worker safety, union-busting, antitrust and fair competition, child labor, truth in advertising, environmental protection, even requirements on the length and validity of warranties.

You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion. A conclusion that implies not only that we should not add further prohibitions against newly-recognized "evil" behavior (e.g. web spying, devices locked against their owner, etc..), but also that we should remove the prohibitions currently in place.

>Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed

We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental.

Companies don't poison the water or use bad labor practices because they want to. Large organizations (Boeing, the Catholic church, the FBI, etc) don't "want". They respond to incentives. Companies do it because it's less un-profitable than the next best option and to not do that while their competitors do puts them at a disadvantage. Regulation only adjusts the incentive scale.

>You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion

You have to ignore the difference between "good" and "can be harnessed for good" to come to that conclusion. You're implying meaning he didn't write because it makes a more easily defeated position.

> We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental.

Those messes are the worst of their greed that I was referring to. I have no idea what your objection is - that those laws didn't "mandate companies behave good", but merely "readjusted incentives to avoid undesirable outcomes"??

Of course laws are not as simplistic as "try to do good, avoid doing evil", but that doesn't mean that is not their aim.

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