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Comment by Freedom2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a huge fan of government overreach like this. Workers should have refused to work with the material if it were truly dangerous, and the free market would have eventually pushed engineered stone out, giving way to innovation for a better, safer material.

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> Workers should have refused to work with the material if it were truly dangerous

They did -- several months ago. The relevant unions members voted to refuse to work with engineered stone at all, if it was not banned outright by the government, which is what happened yesterday.

https://www.australianunions.org.au/2023/10/24/unions-vote-t...

I'm not a huge fan of government overreach either. Children should have refused to work if child labor was truly bad, and the free market would have eventually pushed child labor out, giving way to better, more ethical labor practices.

Did you get raised reading only economic and game theory texts? Real people in the real world don't have as much agency as you'd like to think. Sometimes you take the job that you can get. See Amazon warehouse workers.

Obviously not, a trained economist would know about market failures.

A lot of good feedback in this thread that is making me reconsider my opinion, but to answer this specifically, no. I didn't have much of a thought on economic theory until I started frequenting this message board and I was enamored by the liberties offered by the free market as spouted by highly rated HN posters, as well as essays and long-form articles that have been highly upvoted on this site.

In Bangladesh they required government passing and enforcing new laws to end lead contamination of turmeric powder which had been ongoing for years and poisoned the entire population. Government responsibility is not government overreach. If the government merely warned the population and left it to the free market, the sellers would continue to sell contaminated turmeric while claiming it is free of contaminants. If left purely to the free market, eventually consumers would put an end to lead contamination, by creating a new government that enforces laws against lead contamination.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231204184119/https://www.econo...

a) It is truly dangerous. On par with asbestos.

b) At least here in Australia the government any by extension taxpayers will have an increased health care burden because of this. Therefore it is entirely justified to limit its use.

My understanding is that a countertop won't release silica dust unless you cut it with power tools, unlike exposed asbestos which releases fibers with much less effort.

Correct.

Asbestos degrades over time and releases fibers with almost no effort/interaction with the material.

Engineered stone only releases dangerous particles when cut. It does not degrade.

They both require special care when being disposed of, but they are not "on par"

The trade union movement says ban engineered stone or we will Media Release - October 24, 2023

https://www.actu.org.au/media-release/the-trade-union-moveme...

You are confused. This is a severe health risk which has already destroyed peoples lives, not an issue of theoretical economics, hence you got downvoted. Government is doing its job. Better and safer materials already exist.

> the free market would have...

With the exception of vivid imaginations, there is no free market to speak of.

Well, if you call it "government overreach" it's hard to be a fan.

> Workers should have refused to work with the material if it were truly dangerous, and the free market would have eventually pushed engineered stone out, giving way to innovation for a better, safer material.

I think you need to consider this from a game theory perspective. Sometimes there are systemic negative outcomes that can only be addressed with systemic mitigations. Governments/the law serve a purpose by establishing the ground rules in which the market operates. How you structure those rules changes systemic outcomes.

Without the ground rules, UFC would devolve into people just shooting each other.

That's incredibly uncompassionate. And how is this government overreach? The government worked with the industry, and this saga has had years for engineered stone to be "pushed out". What if it took another 20 years and thousands of young people with lung cancer to reach that end? I don't see how that's worth it.

Workers often don't have much choice, even if they knew the harm being done to them.

Markets have market failures like externalities and information asymmetry

The free market hasn’t been paying for the healthcare costs so far, so I don’t see why it should get to decide what is safe or not safe to use.

australia's experience with asbestos would indicate otherwise.

You're saying a worker should just quit their job on the spot...? And pay for rent and food....how...?

You get it - when someone is hand to mouth, their theoretical market freedoms are pretty limited, particularly in this field when everyone else is using the same materials.

To be fair, someone who wants 'the market' to determine when people stop dying from a provably dangerous product doesn't give a steaming crap about the poors impacted.

I think within reason, people should be able to chose their own destiny - we shouldn't lie to ourselves however and assign people agency in cases where they have none - most employees have little agency to exercise in the relationship with their boss.

"the free market would have eventually pushed engineered stone out"

Lol.

Is this satire?

It’s your brain after too much HN

Exactly. The poster himself points out that he got these views after reading so many highly-voted comments here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38634213#38635045

Let's face it: HN is a hotbed of libertarian dogma such as this, so while the OP may or may not be trolling, the people on this site need to own this. Heck, one of the very founders of this site was a staunch libertarian, so the OP's post really isn't abnormal here at all.

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