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Comment by scns | Hacker News Reader

It is way harder to manipulate people to do the right thing i think.

That presupposes that the left in the US wants to do the right thing. Something like government run grocery stores is not clearly correct and there is very little evidence supporting that it will work well yet it is a very popular leftist policy in New York.

City run grocery stores are certainly not evil.

... not overtly, intentionally evil.

FTFY

What’s the case that they’re secretly, unintentionally evil?

They destroy grocery stores that offer variety in every neighborhood they operate in. They offer worse service and people put up with it because the rest of New York is subsidizing them through taxes.

Bad economic policy is subtly "evil", by way of allocating finite resources inefficiently. Usually this is unintentionally done by not appropriately taking second, third, ..., nth order effects into account.

... which would make (our current model of) capitalism especially evil. Compared to a supermarket.

The margins for groceries are objectively thin. The only way to provide food at lower prices is to provide a worse good or service, eg. less variety, less quality, less availability, etc. You will see all of these outcomes in NYC, if anyone even accepts the bids to begin with.

Based on zero evidence. It’s very easy for a government to step in as a participant, ruin the profitability of a sector in an area, and offer a worse service.

They have no profit requirement or even revenue neutral requirement. So they can just operate poorly at a loss and still wreck other businesses because people will put up with breadlines to get bread for ultra cheap.

The general thing to watch out for with all of these “surely it can’t be evil to do nice thing X” is suicidal empathy. It can seem correct to your gut on the surface while it’s extremely destructive in the long term despite participants wanting to destroy something as an explicit goal.

It's harder to convince people to all agree on the same, different from the norm, thing.

If you've got 5 people in a car and you play ABBA in every road trip, then one day you suggest to change, the problem is not in being okay with "something else", but on agreeing what that other thing should be, set against the already known thing.

That's why there's so much infighting in the left.

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