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Comment by shric | Hacker News Reader

In theory this discrimination will be discovered (as in, see article) and if people don't like it they will select for companies that do not have (or have less) such discrimination.

If all businesses discriminate then there is an opportunity to compete using no discrimination as an edge.

Just as, for example, if a business decided (if it was legal) to only allow people of a certain race to enter, I would like to think that most members of that race would be disgusted enough to boycott that business and the business will rightly fail.

Finally, people already effectively pay different amounts for all sorts of things due to varying amounts of tax paid.

The private sector can't detect or profit from your tax paid so they use where you live and other signals like whether you're using an iPhone etc. as a proxy for your income/wealth.

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In theory, that is true. In reality, there's a thousand reasons why it's not in the world of digital (and many non-digital) services in 2025.

People really take Adam Smith way too seriously. He lived at a time when the economy was made up of independent artisans not people working for large multinational corporations. If markets were really so good at regulating themselves why were any government standards necessary at all?

The reality is, every product has an asymmetry of information, and the more complex it is, the higher the asymmetry. And you can’t determine the quality of a product until you buy it. And determining quality takes time, which is a limited resource.

> the business will rightly fail

In reality, what stops bad behavior is regulation because in reality, people do not have infinite time and infinite information to assess each thing they consume.

> In reality, what stops bad behavior is regulation because in reality, people do not have infinite time and infinite information to assess each thing they consume.

Reputation is much easier to destroy and bad behavior is much harder to hide today than 50 years ago due to the easier spread of information.

There is still a huge spectrum of business behaviour that is not violating regulations. In the aggregate businesses who please their consumers more will thrive compared to those that don't.

Adam Smith is often used as symbol of laissez-faire capitalism but was explicitly a proponent for regulation in situations where the market failed, such as this one imagine.

What you probably mean is that people take the concept of the invisible hand too seriously. Which was a relatively minor point in the book, and has somehow been magnified to the point of absurdity by the economic and political trends of the last 40 years.

Adam smith is way more reasonable than you’d think, given how he’s portrayed in the modern era.

>Just as, for example, if a business decided (if it was legal) to only allow people of a certain race to enter, I would like to think that most members of that race would be disgusted enough to boycott that business and the business will rightly fail.

We literally have federal laws outlawing this because it was, in fact, a selling point to exclude other races. Are you unaware of the history, or just hoping that racism has successfully been ended in the United States?

1964 was 60 years ago.

So you think if the law was removed from the books people would simply choose not to have racist public establishments in 2025?

Most businesses struggle to stay afloat without adding racial discrimination.

I suspect almost all such businesses would die quickly.

So yes, there would be such public disgust and stigma that even those patrons who valued such a business would hopefully hesitate to expose their bigotry.

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