Quote Originally Posted by CoccoBill View Post
Not at all? Any mid-manager with any decision power (e.g. product/service/security manager) is able to do this. The damage is done and the person moved on to greener pastures before the info comes out and the market is able to adjust, this is my point. And of course this is also possible and does happen in government, and pretty much every position where humans exist. The point was that it does also happen in the private sector, where you suggested it can't happen because markets.
I was referring to it being a systemic risk. A lot of people can do things like this, but they can't cause that big of problems by doing them. The corporate structure that has grown out of our market system demonstrates that the fail-safes are pretty great. Except, however, when incentives are created by and salvation is provided by government (like with the housing crisis)



I'm sure it improves certain aspects, safety and equality not being some of them. I'm unconvinced that those and some other qualities would be ensured by free markets alone, since free markets are run by people who are in large part selfish greedy idiots. I'd rather put restrictions on the damage those can do.
I understand the sentiment. I use to feel the same way. Moral hazard and unintended consequences are what changed my mind. "Regulatory restrictions on damage" is how we can explain why marijuana is illegal and millions of lives ruined. What I see is far greater damage than if the regulations didn't exist in the first place.



Again, is this an observation of the effect of current US policies, or based on a theoretical analysis of all possible regulatory models? Let's make it clear at this point, that from what I know of US policies, some first hand, I'm sure a free market would be a much better option than what you have in place now. I just think models that beat them both can exist.
The factors that parts of Europe have that make it better than the US are capitalist policies. Denmark and Sweden are two of the most business-friendly countries on the planet, and Germany turned from the sick man of Europe to a decade later being the strongest of the bunch through a handful of capitalist reforms (like in the labor market)



I don't think it takes much capital and prestige to put out false info about competitors or your own products, the less easy those are to fact check the better. They might get caught or they might not. Sometimes when they do get it's already too late. Also there are several psychological mechanisms affecting this, such as negativity bias, which makes it much more likely for people to remember any false claims put out (such as in elections smearing a candidate) than the later corrections or counterarguments. Your pharma observation is due to bad government, not *any government*, IMO.
How is it not "any government" when the job of government is to design laws for its constituents? The faults I lay on the hands of government are not about them being bad, but about how their innate structure and purpose is to create legislation that invariable causes more problems than it fixes. Renton is correct in that the smartest people on the planet could all be dropped in Congress and the place would still be a disaster. In many ways, a dictatorship would work better here, but it's "the law" and "a centralized body whose purpose is to devise laws" that's the problem. The reason this is the problem is because there is little accountability and little competition for reform. Capitalism is basically a system of de facto laws existing based on choices made by its participants.



It doesn't take all that much to start up a pizza joint and this is actually a real life example, minus the turds. But you may be right in the sense, that these are mainly made possible due to gov incentives for small businesses. However, I'm sure someone can come up with a better example, where the profits from unethical business make it worthwhile to operate even short periods and start anew. Internet crime and spamming come to mind, but just because I can't think of any right now doesn't mean they don't exist. Anyway, by a turd pizza I meant cutting corners in the production to produce something that looks and tastes legit, but isn't up to the expected standards.
What has the government done to stop internet crime? Virtually nothing. The market is working. The internet is one of the best social experiments we'll ever have. It's a hyper-free market and what it has been doing for humans is incredible. The only systemic problems with it seem to be coming from government intervention. Poker is a great example of that

Also I do not think the "short term profit" idea is a systemic risk in enterprise. It's a popular notion because people misunderstand what went on in Wall Street and think that all corporations care about is the short term. I don't think that's true and I think self-perpetuation is at the core of corporate operations. The evidence bears this out. There are millions examples of companies striving for self-perpetuation, and virtually zero of the opposite. Even the snake-oil salesmen (like fake-nutrition gurus) still don't operate on the "dine and dash" philosophy. Most examples that look like private foul-play are layered in government incentives, so we can't call it that.


How regularly do popular journalists visit every goddamn burger joint in the US? And I don't mean for a happy meal, but to inspect their kitchens, sanitation processes, cold chains, storage, food samples and other safety standards? I wouldn't want to rely solely on foodspotting reviews or some crap like that. I'm afraid not a large enough portion of the clientele is ready to dish out cash for independent 3rd party inspection services, they just want their 99c menu and prefer not to know what's in it.
If something is bad, it has bad consequences. When the consequences happen, the curtains are pulled back. Regulators aren't providing any value to this system. In fact, they sometimes stop innovation in this system by setting legal allowances on levels of "the bad".

Take delivery services for example. The government doesn't regulate them that much, but when people get broken deliveries, problems are on the cusp for the company because of how word gets out, especially today with so many cameras. Customers do not like this and start going for the competition, which is a huge crisis for the company and they have to start fixing it by finding the culprits. They can't sweep it under the rug because that wouldn't change the effects

It's like evolution. Fix it or die. This isn't just an example of why regulation typically doesn't help anything, but how it creates another less-often addressed problem in its monopoly power. It's good that we can change delivery services if we find a reason to, but we can't change governments. The former is a healthy and innovating market, the latter is a monopoly that gets away with anything and everything.

Is this a relevant question: Why does government get to murder millions of people and suffer very little consequences, while if Amazon and Google did that, they'd be destroyed in two days?



I disagree on the incentives, for businesses it's to make everyone think they're running a clean ship, whether it actually is is inconsequential. I feel this is an important distinction. The penalties governments impose on their employees for screwing up are probably not inherent to the theory of public governance, and neither are government bailouts.
Sure it's not inherent to the theory, but the practice is. How many businesses have gone bankrupt due to being out-competed by other businesses? Millions. How many government bureaucracies have gone bankrupt for just about any reasons? Zero