Comment by ameister14 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ameister14 | Hacker News Reader

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Companies as we currently know them mostly did not exist in the 1700's. Where they did many of the biggest were monopolies granted by the government.

The free market has never existed on a wide scale, so no company currently has to survive in a free market. It is a thought experiment and in practice regulated markets are far superior because the market is a pretty bad governor for society. Further, to have a free market you need perfect transparency, a state which is not realistically possible to begin with but if it were possible would only be achieved through regulation, such as disclosure requirements.

In that free market, by the way, companies absolutely will poison the air and water, in large part because people do not make purchase decisions based on downstream externalities. Even if they did, they won't be able to prove the company poisoned the river and the company won't be breaking any laws so a lot of people will simply allow it to continue. Now if the products themselves were poisonous, it's possible, but historically this just led to merchants moving from town to town to poison new people who hadn't heard of them.

>The reason companies do nefarious things is government interference in markets, insulating companies from competition.

This is so ridiculous I am not sure you're serious now. Are you just trolling?

> The free market has never existed on a wide scale, so no company currently has to survive in a free market.

But...

> This is so ridiculous

It is? Aren't you saying the same thing?

Not at all.

Despite the "state of nature" being theoretical, you wouldn't say that the reason people harm eachother is because of government regulations, would you? Of course you wouldn't, because you can think of a lot of reasons for people to harm eachother absent government regulation.

See? You can say that the complete absence of social structure is a theoretical state and also say that the presence of government and social structure is not the sole cause for conflict.

> the presence of government and social structure is not the sole cause for conflict

First, I didn't say "conflict"; my statement was much more specific. Second, companies are not people. Companies are tools that people use. Some people misuse them.

Perhaps it will help if I rephrase: the reason nefarious people can use companies as tools to do nefarious things on a large scale, the kind of scale that affects a large number of people, is government regulation.

I knew you did not use the word conflict, I did so in an analogy to another philosophical thought experiment called the state of nature. I was trying (and clearly failing, my fault) to illustrate a logic issue you were having; just because we have regulations and companies do nefarious things does not mean that the regulations cause the nefarious things.

>the reason nefarious people can use companies as tools to do nefarious things on a large scale, the kind of scale that affects a large number of people, is government regulation.

You are wrong. Companies do nefarious things on a large scale and would even at peak efficiency in a free market because it is more efficient to cause harm than it is to take steps to prevent it.

Looking back to less regulated times in the US may be illustrative.

When there was no government regulation for river cleanliness, companies routinely polluted the rivers. They did not do this because of the government regulation that, again, did not exist. They did it because it is a lot cheaper to dirty a river than it is to install the mechanisms to keep it clean, and the benefits to the company from keeping the river clean, barring regulatory oversight, do not suffice to balance the scales.

Similarly, in countries with less stringent regulations companies pollute and cause widespread harm.

The acceptable level of pollution in a free-market system is much higher than the desirable level, because until a tipping point where the company's sales are impacted they will continue to pollute. The equilibrium point is lowered through regulation. That's literally what it does.

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