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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Cool, give me as much statute and regulation required to squeeze companies and encourage competition to drive down profits while protecting workers. This system and game is all arbitrary, we can change the rules (of course, with time and effort). If we have to kill some companies to do this, that's acceptable. As someone wise once said, "We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try."

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The way you protect workers is to create the most appealing place to employ them for people starting businesses.

Otherwise, those businesses will go to somewhere with a less regulated environment and ship it in.

The only way to truly protect workers is to increase the cost of bypassing the regulations that you want to protect them so that operating within the regulations is the best choice for the business.

This is a disconnect that we see in numerous topics nationally, like pushes to raise the minimum wage which just result in lots of job losses while companies relocate. So instead you see politicians push for a national increase to the minimum wage, so that there’s nowhere else in the US to relocate to because they are all equally expensive.

The moment you start creating policies where the first concern is making sure people can’t escape, it should be an indicator to rethink the policy.

Are you going to stop at killing corporations? I can imagine a few people might also try to stop you from this people’s revolution you’re envisioning.

Democratic socialists were just recently democratically elected in NYC and Seattle. Support for unions in the US is at historical record highs [1]. ~2M 55+ people in the US die every year, ~5k per day. ~3M people turn 18 every year and become eligible to vote, young people who only see bleakness ahead. 31% of wealth is held by people over 70 [2]. This is a population dynamics story, old ideas die out, new ideas come in (Planck's principle). I'm confident support for worker vs corporate policies is high, based on all available evidence [3] [4] [5]. Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life on their income [6], as another data point. So, I'm unsure who is in the "pro capitalism pro corporation" corner to be honest, when you consider the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of equities.

No harm should come to humans of course, but corporations, entities, and systems are all fair game.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)

[2] 31% of Wealth Owned by People Over 70 - https://www.apolloacademy.com/31-percent-of-wealth-owned-by-... - December 7th, 2025

[3] The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079617 - November 2025 (4 comments)

[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher... ("A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.")

[5] Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062082 - November 2025 (15 comments)

[6] https://www.lisep.org/mql

(think in systems)

Your take is questionable and increasingly becomes asinine every time a boomer croaks and a young person makes it to voting age. No amount of seductive "institutions who's inner workings we will figure out late as though they don't make or break it all will provide for us" rhetoric are going to change the fact that the electorate is increasingly made up of people who have only seen institutions, both public and private, engage in accumulation of power self enrichment at the expense of literally everyone else.

I don't know what the future holds but I assure you it does not involve the people vesting yet more power in institutions that have only led them astray in their lifetimes (governments, unions and other industry groups, academia, etc). As the evil among us like to say "demographics are destiny" [1].

[1]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Given how Trump’s second election seems to have been driven by the youth vote, it seems like an overly optimistic take to assume that youth vote is in the bag for progressive ideas. And we’ll see what Mondani has in store in terms of actual progressive policies that he can enact, but corporate death penalty is not on the table last I checked.

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