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Comment by throw9174 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this kind of argument prove too much?

Consider an alternate reality without food standards and regulations. Things like the melamine incident are commonplace and people regularly suffer due to contaminated food. Someone argues "perhaps the corporations should stop poisoning our food". Then someone else responds "Stop demonizing the executives, their objective is to make a profit, which they get from the consumers. The consumers are the ones buying the contaminated food, the executives aren't. If people don't want to get sick, they should exercise more diligence."

It's easy to offload coordination problems on the people who make imperfect decisions as a consequence, but saying "just don't have coordination problems, then" is rarely useful if one wants to mitigate those problems.

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People don't want to buy poisonous food knowing it's poison. They might take a gamble on if it the odds seem good enough. (even in highly safety regulated western countries, people sometimes die from contaminated food). In contrast, people do want to burn petrol knowing that it 100% will pollute the environment every single time they drive their car. We do what benefits us personally despite the cost to the environment. So it's our fault. It's hard to correct your own faults while you're blaming somebody else for them instead of accepting responsibility.

Most people don't get to pick how much money they have, their employer does. Most people don't choose and how much the car they want costs, a company does. Most people have very little say on laws and regulations, but billionaires have friends and family in government.

If billionaires were less greedy and paid more, more people could choose environmentally friendly options. If billionaires were less greedy and sold environmental options for cheaper, more people could choose environmentally friendly options. If billionaires cared about the planet, they could use their influence to pass laws for the good of the planet.

Instead you have corporations holding salaries down and squeezing margins from their customers. How's someone making the median salary in Bolivia ($3,631/yr) supposed to buy anything but the cheapest gas-burning car?

You got corporations going full cartoon villain too with disinformation campaigns, lies and bribes/lobbying to impede anything regulation that would cut into their profits. Exxon wants to keep selling gas, and the's a lot they can do (and have done) to keep you without any options but gas [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evy2EgoveuE

If billionaires gave their money to poor people, they're not going to spend it on electric cars because of the environment. They're going to spend it on stuff that benefits them personally because most people are basically more selfish than environmentalist.

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