3 ms·

We could use markets to shape humanity based on our collective values but instead we let the markets shape us. Perhaps it’s a failure to coalesce around shared

We could use markets to shape humanity based on our collective values but instead we let the markets shape us. Perhaps it’s a failure to coalesce around shared values; too much tribalism. Clearly some political regimes are better able to harness the power of the state to guide the invisible hand to do its work where it’s most needed. By delegating the “guiding” role to market participants themselves, those who control markets by lobbying and legislating, we forfeit our control.

cr0sh 8y ago
> By delegating the “guiding” role to market participants themselves, those who control markets by lobbying and legislating, we forfeit our control. This discussion is interesting; I was thinking something similar this morning, with the focus on our collective food choices. It's an imperfect analogy, but there are many things that we as both a society and thru governments we have banned, or highly regulated, as having too many external negative issues to allow them to continue to be sold openly on the market. You can think of any number of drugs (including more than a few that used to be OTC not long ago), stuff like "high test peroxide", cigarettes and tobacco products, etc. For the vast majority of these, though, none have extreme externalities - that is, none cause death in society like certain foods that are easily available. But those items don't have huge lobbying efforts around them, either. For instance - we know that HFCS is a great contributor to obesity and heart disease/stroke - yet we don't ban it for commercial food usage. While there have been recent inroads from a consumer standpoint (next time you go shopping for food, note the number of ordinary items that have packaging marked as "contains no HFCS" or similar), it's unknown whether this will continue to be a trend, nor how long it will take to rid the majority of purchased food items of the substance. It is also unknown how long it will take for the effects of its removal to show up in the overall health levels of society. But there again is a product that we freely allow in our foods that arguably is slowly killing all of us; one could say "well, you are free not to eat those foods" - but one could have argued the same about tobacco and cigarettes not too long back (and they did). There is actually a good parallel between both the tobacco industry and the corn/HFCS industry (the lobbying, hidden and such papers about the dangers, etc) - but even in the case of tobacco, there wasn't an outright ban; it's been more of a slow attrition via consumers and the public...

cr0sh 8y ago

> By delegating the “guiding” role to market participants themselves, those who control markets by lobbying and legislating, we forfeit our control. This discussion is interesting; I was thinking something similar this morning, with the focus on our collective food choices. It's an imperfect analogy, but there are many things that we as both a society and thru governments we have banned, or highly regulated, as having too many external negative issues to allow them to continue to be sold openly on the market. You can think of any number of drugs (including more than a few that used to be OTC not long ago), stuff like "high test peroxide", cigarettes and tobacco products, etc. For the vast majority of these, though, none have extreme externalities - that is, none cause death in society like certain foods that are easily available. But those items don't have huge lobbying efforts around them, either. For instance - we know that HFCS is a great contributor to obesity and heart disease/stroke - yet we don't ban it for commercial food usage. While there have been recent inroads from a consumer standpoint (next time you go shopping for food, note the number of ordinary items that have packaging marked as "contains no HFCS" or similar), it's unknown whether this will continue to be a trend, nor how long it will take to rid the majority of purchased food items of the substance. It is also unknown how long it will take for the effects of its removal to show up in the overall health levels of society. But there again is a product that we freely allow in our foods that arguably is slowly killing all of us; one could say "well, you are free not to eat those foods" - but one could have argued the same about tobacco and cigarettes not too long back (and they did). There is actually a good parallel between both the tobacco industry and the corn/HFCS industry (the lobbying, hidden and such papers about the dangers, etc) - but even in the case of tobacco, there wasn't an outright ban; it's been more of a slow attrition via consumers and the public...