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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

That's why the judicial-prison economy developed - to establish a financial relation between the two. We know it as "kids for cash"[1] and judges can make "millions of dollars" in payments from private facilities.

Outlawing such arrangements only pushes the blackmarket economy of kids for cash underground. Instead, of course, it should be regulated.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

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Maybe I'm missing something but it seems downright wrong for judges to have any financial incentive for ANY decision they make. Why would that be something we want to regulate? Seems like a judge should lose their position if they have a conflict of interest and rule anyway.

>Seems like a judge should lose their position if they have a conflict of interest and rule anyway.

That's pretty much what happened to the judge in the article linked by GP (you should read it, it's horrifying). Mostly because it's hard to work as a judge when you're serving a 17.5 year prison sentence.

I know it sounds wrong, but the same goes for guns, drugs, and just about anything else illegal. If it's banned, it's just pushed underground where it can't be regulated at all.

Besides, if there isn't a market for child-imprisonment, then we won't be able to accurately price it as a commodity. Not being able to price commodified child-imprisonment means the market for it will be much more inefficient than it needs to be. Efficient markets imply positive public good. It's really that simple.

Wow what a horribly worded idea. I can't tell if you are trolling everyone or if you are a diehard libertarian capitalist. The implications from your suggestion would imply that regulating behavior outside of markets has never existed in the lifespan of the human race. I agree incentives are what regulate behavior but leaping from child-imprisionment is bad to we should make it legal and efficient is the only/best/reasonable solution disregards so much human legacy and sidesteps so many societal issues with normalizing this bullshit while allowing the horrible shit to live and grow. This shouldn't be normalized. Maybe child-imprisonment shouldn't exist in the first place? Why is your market based idea so easily reached for instead of taking a step back and saying this shouldn't happen under any circumstance or only in very rare circumstances? Why try and motivate behavior at the end of a cycle instead of totally doing away with the cycle to begin with?

Ideas like this show a moral bankruptcy that has become so ingrained in our Technocratic elites and we wonder why there is such a disconnection between different groups in our society.

Ideally, moral value would be signaled by market-based price discovery. Economic progress is one of creating markets for more things, not fewer. Markets for some things but not others reeks of special pleading.

> Economic progress is one of creating markets for more things, not fewer.

So, eliminating markets for people was a bad thing?

If I was forced to admit that sometimes markets were bad, then I'd have to re-evaluate our entire economic system - what if healthcare markets, gun markets, even employment markets were up for debate? Under what criteria would one even evaluate those? Moreover, how could we even tell if they were genuinely bad or good, or if the particular cultural context and social indoctrination predisposed me to think they were good through social conditioning?

Why, for example, would a market for health care be good, but a market for child-imprisonment be bad? If a market for child-imprisonment were susceptible to bad actors, perverse incentives, and bad outcomes, then it stands to reason the same could be said of all markets. That's a rather large implication, I'm sure we agree on.

If humane child imprisonment is valued by the market participants, then that's what the market will provide. If a market doesn't signal that it's important, then it's definitionally not important. That's what price signalling is all about.

Kelseyfrog is trolling and enjoys using straw-man arguments to poke fun at other ideologies. I've debated with them before. Have you ever seen an ancap with pronouns in their profile lol? It's sarcasm.

I like debating. I use debate to test out theories and ideas all the time. It's a great way to learn what works and what doesn't. You don't have to believe everything you debate. The idea that people have to earnestly debate their own beliefs is a limiting mindset.

It seems like what people are trying to say is that market outcomes dictate market success. Eg: bad market outcomes = bad place to hold a market, but no one is flat out saying it. At the same time, we have the idea that markets are "the best thing we have and any limits on markets produce negative outcomes." This is a contradiction and at this point at this place, I don't think debating that topic directly is going to teach me anything. Debating the fringes, however is.

It's the same thing as saying "X doesn't work" on StackOverflow and getting people to prove that it does. It's that we're doing it with something non-tech this time.

There's a conversation in Harper's this month along these lines:

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/02/is-liberalism-worth-savi...

The conversation flits around a bit too quickly for my taste, but some interesting points are made.

Yeah. Let's create a legal market for human organs and start with yours.

It will be most efficient. I promise!

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