6 ms·

Let's see if I understand: * Companies are put into revenue tiers. * The price for any good/service paid by a company is increased by some TBD formula. * Rou

by Bjartr 5y ago

Let's see if I understand: * Companies are put into revenue tiers. * The price for any good/service paid by a company is increased by some TBD formula. * Roughly speaking, the formula chosen would mean that companies in higher revenue tiers pay more. * Then survey companies/consumers that interact with a company to determine if that company is following the rules. * Plus a rule to forbid playing shell games with companies you own. If that's all in the ballpark of what you where trying to communicate, here are my immediate thoughts: * Based on the "into the economy" instead of taxes angle, I'm assuming the intent is for the premium paid still goes to the company selling the good/service. I suspect this could end up incentivizing a pricing structure like the one we see in US medicine where insurance companies negotiate that they'll pay some discounted amount to the hospital, but the hospital just raises the line item cost a commensurate amount so they end up being paid what they originally wanted to. Only it'd be large companies will purchase from companies who agree to negotiate a price that after adding the legally mandated premium, ends up being what they wanted to pay anyway. Of course the selling company will be fine with this because it means business from a large company. * Using surveys to determine compliance creates a perverse incentives to poison the surveys of your competitors. Even without such laws we already see that happen with Amazon reviews. Companies pay to have negative reviews placed on their competitors products. * I'll suggest a possible negative conservative viewpoint: Manipulating an independent company's pricing by legal mandate in some new way is regulatory overreach. * If disallowing self-ownership of multiple companies based on some rules were enough to stop collusion, we'd have solved it years ago. If I can't own it myself, I'll pay someone to own it, and have them follow my orders. This is well within the borders of what the SEC already deals with, only they deal with way more complicated versions of it. For example, the loophole du jour is SPACs. SEC says that both companies involved in a merger must meet certain requirements. Those requirements can be inconvenient for an existing company to meet (audits take time and money), so instead create a brand new company, which you control in practice, that's squeaky clean from the SEC's standpoint and have THAT company make the actual purchase. That's a Special Purpose Acquisition Company. The takeaway I think is that ultimately, trying to regulate financial behavior directly is a losing game full of unintended consequences. It's all about (dis)incentives. Subsidies incentivize. Taxes disincentivize. Everything will be gamed to the nth degree.

unexaminedlife 5y ago
So, I agree that in today's economic climate it likely would be difficult to work well initially. However, I think that's mostly because (at least from my perspective) we all KNOW today that the largest corporations in the world have already won. At least on the current economic playground. So I think one thing I didn't explain was that I believe that a particular type of phenomenon would "arise" from a structure like I've proposed. For example, at small scale Bitcoin (for all intents and purposes) is worthless due to things like the "51% attack". But at a large enough scale, where enough people are standing firmly on their own two feet, fewer and fewer people are subject to the whims of some "elite class". The reasoning then follows that the more soundly something like this was regulated the more difficult it becomes for an elite class to exist let alone manipulate everything. What I think also here is (from my perspective) an insight into human nature. That insight tells me that, by nature when people aren't forced or leverage doesn't exist to coerce people to comply, the manipulation will exponentially decrease as fewer and fewer people see it as a necessity to survive. As it becomes exponentially more difficult to be greedy, I think greedy people will start to be far less greedy.
- Bjartr 5y ago
  You come across as underestimating the scale of the economy and the lengths people already go to in the name of greed today. You speak about regulation as though it's some new idea. It's not. There's oodles of regulation, layered over a few centuries of people gaming and exploiting the system and the system coming up with new ways to identify and stop it. People are more clever than you give them credit for and are more likely to simply game the system you describe to leverage things even more. You say by making it harder to be greedy people will stop being greedy. I say it's more likely they'll find new ways of being greedy before they give it up. Then you're back to square one, but with a more complex system that costs more to simply maintain the status quo.
  - unexaminedlife 5y ago
    I think it's less about underestimating and more about finding the right abstractions and trade-offs. As far as I understand all the real debate is surrounded by "more taxes" vs "less taxes". No major debate is really trying to think of fundamentally different trade offs. Some people may interpret it as a naive point of view. I don't think that's the case. The "layers" of regulation I think could possibly be likened to a legacy code-base that has accumulated patches on top of patches on top of patches. But in reality the problem isn't that that was necessary. In reality maybe the original code kinda sucked or had a few malicious patches injected over the years (ie. case law, supreme court decisions, etc)

by Bjartr 5y ago

unexaminedlife 5y ago

So, I agree that in today's economic climate it likely would be difficult to work well initially. However, I think that's mostly because (at least from my perspective) we all KNOW today that the largest corporations in the world have already won. At least on the current economic playground. So I think one thing I didn't explain was that I believe that a particular type of phenomenon would "arise" from a structure like I've proposed. For example, at small scale Bitcoin (for all intents and purposes) is worthless due to things like the "51% attack". But at a large enough scale, where enough people are standing firmly on their own two feet, fewer and fewer people are subject to the whims of some "elite class". The reasoning then follows that the more soundly something like this was regulated the more difficult it becomes for an elite class to exist let alone manipulate everything. What I think also here is (from my perspective) an insight into human nature. That insight tells me that, by nature when people aren't forced or leverage doesn't exist to coerce people to comply, the manipulation will exponentially decrease as fewer and fewer people see it as a necessity to survive. As it becomes exponentially more difficult to be greedy, I think greedy people will start to be far less greedy.

Bjartr 5y ago
You come across as underestimating the scale of the economy and the lengths people already go to in the name of greed today. You speak about regulation as though it's some new idea. It's not. There's oodles of regulation, layered over a few centuries of people gaming and exploiting the system and the system coming up with new ways to identify and stop it. People are more clever than you give them credit for and are more likely to simply game the system you describe to leverage things even more. You say by making it harder to be greedy people will stop being greedy. I say it's more likely they'll find new ways of being greedy before they give it up. Then you're back to square one, but with a more complex system that costs more to simply maintain the status quo.
- unexaminedlife 5y ago
  I think it's less about underestimating and more about finding the right abstractions and trade-offs. As far as I understand all the real debate is surrounded by "more taxes" vs "less taxes". No major debate is really trying to think of fundamentally different trade offs. Some people may interpret it as a naive point of view. I don't think that's the case. The "layers" of regulation I think could possibly be likened to a legacy code-base that has accumulated patches on top of patches on top of patches. But in reality the problem isn't that that was necessary. In reality maybe the original code kinda sucked or had a few malicious patches injected over the years (ie. case law, supreme court decisions, etc)