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Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

The market has not decided on anything; to employ Americans, you have to pay huge amounts of extra taxes and provide all sorts of legally mandated protections, and to operate an American business, you have to follow all sorts of operational and environmental laws that foreigners don't have to follow. Yet they're allowed to sell their goods in the same venues as Americans.

If there are two ice cream vendors at the park, and the park charges one ice cream vendor a $350/day license and the other one doesn't have to license itself at all, has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?

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> has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?

I think recently we've decided it does? Look at Uber versus licensed taxis, Airbnb versus licensed and inspect B&Bs, and many more.

I get what you're saying though, and if there was the will for it then the unlicensed business would be fined such that it would pay more in fines than the cost of a license. It just seems to be going the opposite way.

> If there are two ice cream vendors at the park, and the park charges one ice cream vendor a $350/day license and the other one doesn't have to license itself at all, has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?

I don't know about "superior", but they're certainly going to sell more ice cream.

It has nothing to do with how much ice cream they sell. You cannot determine who would sell more ice cream based on who pays a license fee and who doesn't. What you can say is that the profits from the licensed vendor will be lower because of higher operating costs if they sell the same amount.

A better example would be one ice cream vendor uses ethically sourced milk and pays all it's workers a solid living wage with benefits, effectively functioning as an extra $350/day expense. The other vendor uses minimum wage labor and factory farm milk.

>has the "market" decided that the [unethical] business is superior

Yes, because anyone half paying attention on the ground instead of scrolling self-righteous internet content all day knows that price is actually king above all else.

$18 ethical ice cream cones taste great, but not as great as $4 ice cream cones.

To ground this in reality, look at the insane rise of Shein for clothes.

I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I think we're making the same point, namely that if one business operates American-style and the other business operates third-world style, the third-world style business will win on price every time, making it incredibly, prohibitively difficult to operate "American-style" at scale.

America itself operated "third-world style" for centuries.

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