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Comment by mjx0 | Hacker News Reader

The unlimited “freedom of contract” is an idea that the US Supreme Court reversed position on in the 1930s – merely 30 years after it was invented – and for good reason. For those wondering, “freedom of contract” as a term of art is essentially the idea that a government cannot regulate the behavior of parties to a contract, because the involved parties have some unlimited power of contract. The US Supreme Court found this in Lochner v. New York (1905), and reversed it in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937).

You seem to have implied a business’ right to exist, and operate at the expense of others free from regulation. As demonstrated, the earlier part of your comment was rather light on factually correct information, but could you cite the jurisprudence backing this idea of yours?

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The Court reversed its position because many of justices that supported the Lochner case retired only to be filled in by political allies friendly to the New Deal like senator-turned-judge Byron White. The ones that remained were allegedly pressured by the Roosevelt administration's threats to pack the court (i.e. the switch in time to save nine). Regardless, the actual jurisprudence on Lochner hasn't been rebutted, only deemed unpopular by both wings of the court. The conservatives, due to the invocation of substantive due process, and the social progressives, due to their general aversion to recognize negative economic rights. Law schools will cite Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s lone dissent as "proof" of Lochner's failings, but a close study of it (and of Holmes's legal "realism" as a whole) reveals it to be fallacious, hypocritical, and nihilistic.

In addition, your definition is inconsistent with the standard applied by Lochner or the Constitution. In the majority opinion of Lochner, the power of contract was not unlimited, as the court deemed health regulations in general as a proper exercise of the state's police powers. However, the State of New York had to demonstrate that its health law regarding employee hours was not employment regulation in disguise (hint: it was) and that any such regulation did not infringe upon the protection of rights afforded by the 14th amendment (hint: it did)

Contrary to your statement, freedom of contract had preceded Lochner for over a century. Article 1 Section 10 of the Constitution explicitly recognizes that the states may not inter alia impair contracts. The Contracts Clause has been invoked in Fletcher v. Peck and Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. Both cases form the bedrock of modern contract jurisprudence today.

Yes, almost every country in the world has restrictions on this. For example in the case of employment, with a contract stating that you have to work for life for a company, you can easily challenge it in court since it is more than obvious unconscionability. But the limitations on 'freedom of contract' by the us government never made or make the contracts businesses went into with amazon illegal or contestable.

There is no such thing as 'operate at the expense of others' in this case. Again, nobody forces you to buy at amazon. There is nothing illegal with setting requirements for a seller, e.g. not selling at a discount elsewhere. If you do not wish to sell on amazon you can freely choose to sell at any other store. If one is whining about not having the same reach: Nobody has the right to challenge amazon for just being good and demand anything from them. There is no law that gives you the right to be able to do business 'in the land of amazon' at conditions that please you.

Amazon is a private company. The FTC is treating amazon exactly how many people wrongly see it, as a sort of common good - quote:

'Amazon is a monopolist. It exploits its monopolies in ways that enrich Amazon but harm its customers: both the tens of millions of American households who regularly shop on Amazon's online superstore and the hundreds of thousands of businesses who rely on Amazon to reach them.'

(https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23991590/read-the-ftc...)

Bureaucrats.....Good luck proofing 'conspiration to monopolize'???. A thing which is not even possible in a free market society. The practices of amazon are in fact competitive - doing everything to kill the competition - a thing every capitalistic incentivized company who wants to become or stay at the top does. Those practices of the FTC are anti-competitive and a huge intervention, their policies is what hurting customers.

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