4 ms·

This might work if we were still living in the 1700's, where companies were held in check by the communities they served. Today, they're happy to do the bare mi

This might work if we were still living in the 1700's, where companies were held in check by the communities they served. Today, they're happy to do the bare minimum required (required today, not in the world you're advocating for) to avoid poisoning the air, water, and their customers.

pdonis 2y ago
Poisoning the air, water, and customers is bad for business. Companies who actually have to survive in a free market won't do it for that reason. The reason companies do nefarious things is government interference in markets, insulating companies from competition. And then the government tries to "fix" the problems it had itself caused by doing that with further regulations. Which still doesn't really work because of regulatory capture. If companies did nefarious things a lot less in the 1700s, it was because of the absence of government interference with free markets.
- cyberax 2y ago
  > Poisoning the air, water, and customers is bad for business. Is it? What if your profitability depends on using a polluting substance, like PFAS, and not cleaning up after yourself? > Companies who actually have to survive in a free market won't do it for that reason. Bullshit. We have _many_ examples of the opposite. Remember the whole leaded gasoline hearing, for one. Or the resistance to lead and asbestos phaseout. Moreover, the "free market" _forces_ companies to do that. After all, suppose that you're a responsible company, and you spend money on installing expensive scrubbers for your wastewater to remove PFAS. Your less-responsible competitors will then outcompete you because their product is cheaper-priced. That's why you need laws that force _everyone_ to become equally less competitive by not poisoning people.
  - pdonis 2y ago
    Your theory sounds nice but is not borne out by either basic free market economics or the facts. The reason companies can get away with not being "responsible" is that the market is not free. The government has its thumb on the scale in all kinds of ways. For example, the reason companies can get away with discharging polluting substances like PFAs into the environment is that the government effectively owns the environment, not the people, and the government sucks at protecting what it owns. The government then steps in with further "regulation" to "fix" this problem, but does it badly (regulatory capture is a thing), so that companies aren't actually forced to be "responsible", just to look on paper like they are "responsible" enough to satisfy the regulations.
    - rtkwe 2y ago
      "Basic free market economics" are a convenient lie to make trying to prognosticate on the economy easier. It's built on a set of flawed axioms based around perfect information, extremely low barriers of entry, long time horizons of investors and capital [0], and ignoring things like natural monopolies and network effects. It's a toy model that doesn't match our experience. Your environmental example is equally bad even when people have easy direct damages they can show like the Exxon Valdeeze spill the cost of litigation is massively skewed in favor of the company who can afford to drag cases out for a decade or more until the plaintiffs simply run out of money and have to take a smaller settlement. It's even worse with a lot of pollutants where the effect is more minor but drastically worsens a person's life but happens to so many people it's in aggregate a huge cost. Usually those take the form of an increased risk or prevalence of disease and the company gets to argue endlessly about their culpability for poisoning people because it's hard to prove the negative that they wouldn't have gotten cancer/breathing problems/etc in the absence of the pollution... [0] to allow long term profitable companies to weather short term undercutting by larger companies who can take the losses to kill a competitor for example)
      - pdonis 2y ago
        > to allow long term profitable companies to weather short term undercutting by larger companies who can take the losses to kill a competitor This doesn't work in a free market. Look up David Friedman's discussion in, IIRC, Price Theory of competitors to Standard Oil. > the Exxon Valdeeze spill This was a product of ineffective government regulation, not a free market. In a free market Exxon would have been bankrupt after one such spill--and knowing that would be the outcome, they would have taken better steps to prevent it. Similar remarks apply to, for example, the Deepwater Horizon spill. > the cost of litigation is massively skewed And why? Because governments made it that way.
    - beej71 2y ago
      I'm struggling to think of a case where the free market came up with an environmentally-friendly solution. Sometimes they jump on a save-the-whales bandwagon in a token sense for additional sales, I guess. The environmentally friendly solution is rarely the most profitable, and if it happens to be, the companies are definitely doing it. The cheapest way to make things is to hide the waste until it becomes someone else's problem. Look at some of the mining Superfund sites. Are you voting with your dollars by not buying mined products? The company that made the mess you didn't even know about and are now paying for was dissolved years ago. Or the owner of a gas station lets their tanks rust out causing well water to be ruined in a mile radius. He abandoned the station and moved to another city in shame. And opened another gas station. It sounds kinda like you're underestimating the lure of the bottom line in the free market.
- ameister14 2y ago
  Companies as we currently know them mostly did not exist in the 1700's. Where they did many of the biggest were monopolies granted by the government. The free market has never existed on a wide scale, so no company currently has to survive in a free market. It is a thought experiment and in practice regulated markets are far superior because the market is a pretty bad governor for society. Further, to have a free market you need perfect transparency, a state which is not realistically possible to begin with but if it were possible would only be achieved through regulation, such as disclosure requirements. In that free market, by the way, companies absolutely will poison the air and water, in large part because people do not make purchase decisions based on downstream externalities. Even if they did, they won't be able to prove the company poisoned the river and the company won't be breaking any laws so a lot of people will simply allow it to continue. Now if the products themselves were poisonous, it's possible, but historically this just led to merchants moving from town to town to poison new people who hadn't heard of them. >The reason companies do nefarious things is government interference in markets, insulating companies from competition. This is so ridiculous I am not sure you're serious now. Are you just trolling?
  - pdonis 2y ago
    > The free market has never existed on a wide scale, so no company currently has to survive in a free market. But... > This is so ridiculous It is? Aren't you saying the same thing?
    - ameister14 2y ago
      Not at all. Despite the "state of nature" being theoretical, you wouldn't say that the reason people harm eachother is because of government regulations, would you? Of course you wouldn't, because you can think of a lot of reasons for people to harm eachother absent government regulation. See? You can say that the complete absence of social structure is a theoretical state and also say that the presence of government and social structure is not the sole cause for conflict.
      - pdonis 2y ago
- deadbolt 2y ago
  > Poisoning the air, water, and customers is bad for business. Since when?
  - pdonis 2y ago
    > Since when? Since as long as people haven't wanted polluted air and water or products with harmful substances in them. "Bad for business" means business in an actual free market, where customers have the final say. In what we have now, government has the final say, and government sucks at actually protecting us from these things. Or haven't you noticed that our air, water, and products still have all sorts of harmful things in them, despite all the government regulation?
    - beej71 2y ago
      Surely you remember what it was like in LA in the 70s compared to now!
- relaxing 2y ago
  > Or haven't you noticed that our air, water, and products still have all sorts of harmful things in them, despite all the government regulation? Do you twiddle your mustache and snicker maniacally as you think up these specious arguments? Or are you parroting them from those who do?
  - pdonis 2y ago
    Since you ask, I actually prefer to breathe heavily and intone "I find your lack of faith disturbing."

pdonis 2y ago

Poisoning the air, water, and customers is bad for business. Companies who actually have to survive in a free market won't do it for that reason. The reason companies do nefarious things is government interference in markets, insulating companies from competition. And then the government tries to "fix" the problems it had itself caused by doing that with further regulations. Which still doesn't really work because of regulatory capture. If companies did nefarious things a lot less in the 1700s, it was because of the absence of government interference with free markets.

cyberax 2y ago
> Poisoning the air, water, and customers is bad for business. Is it? What if your profitability depends on using a polluting substance, like PFAS, and not cleaning up after yourself? > Companies who actually have to survive in a free market won't do it for that reason. Bullshit. We have _many_ examples of the opposite. Remember the whole leaded gasoline hearing, for one. Or the resistance to lead and asbestos phaseout. Moreover, the "free market" _forces_ companies to do that. After all, suppose that you're a responsible company, and you spend money on installing expensive scrubbers for your wastewater to remove PFAS. Your less-responsible competitors will then outcompete you because their product is cheaper-priced. That's why you need laws that force _everyone_ to become equally less competitive by not poisoning people.
- pdonis 2y ago
  Your theory sounds nice but is not borne out by either basic free market economics or the facts. The reason companies can get away with not being "responsible" is that the market is not free. The government has its thumb on the scale in all kinds of ways. For example, the reason companies can get away with discharging polluting substances like PFAs into the environment is that the government effectively owns the environment, not the people, and the government sucks at protecting what it owns. The government then steps in with further "regulation" to "fix" this problem, but does it badly (regulatory capture is a thing), so that companies aren't actually forced to be "responsible", just to look on paper like they are "responsible" enough to satisfy the regulations.
  - rtkwe 2y ago
    "Basic free market economics" are a convenient lie to make trying to prognosticate on the economy easier. It's built on a set of flawed axioms based around perfect information, extremely low barriers of entry, long time horizons of investors and capital [0], and ignoring things like natural monopolies and network effects. It's a toy model that doesn't match our experience. Your environmental example is equally bad even when people have easy direct damages they can show like the Exxon Valdeeze spill the cost of litigation is massively skewed in favor of the company who can afford to drag cases out for a decade or more until the plaintiffs simply run out of money and have to take a smaller settlement. It's even worse with a lot of pollutants where the effect is more minor but drastically worsens a person's life but happens to so many people it's in aggregate a huge cost. Usually those take the form of an increased risk or prevalence of disease and the company gets to argue endlessly about their culpability for poisoning people because it's hard to prove the negative that they wouldn't have gotten cancer/breathing problems/etc in the absence of the pollution... [0] to allow long term profitable companies to weather short term undercutting by larger companies who can take the losses to kill a competitor for example)
    - pdonis 2y ago
      > to allow long term profitable companies to weather short term undercutting by larger companies who can take the losses to kill a competitor This doesn't work in a free market. Look up David Friedman's discussion in, IIRC, Price Theory of competitors to Standard Oil. > the Exxon Valdeeze spill This was a product of ineffective government regulation, not a free market. In a free market Exxon would have been bankrupt after one such spill--and knowing that would be the outcome, they would have taken better steps to prevent it. Similar remarks apply to, for example, the Deepwater Horizon spill. > the cost of litigation is massively skewed And why? Because governments made it that way.
  - beej71 2y ago
    I'm struggling to think of a case where the free market came up with an environmentally-friendly solution. Sometimes they jump on a save-the-whales bandwagon in a token sense for additional sales, I guess. The environmentally friendly solution is rarely the most profitable, and if it happens to be, the companies are definitely doing it. The cheapest way to make things is to hide the waste until it becomes someone else's problem. Look at some of the mining Superfund sites. Are you voting with your dollars by not buying mined products? The company that made the mess you didn't even know about and are now paying for was dissolved years ago. Or the owner of a gas station lets their tanks rust out causing well water to be ruined in a mile radius. He abandoned the station and moved to another city in shame. And opened another gas station. It sounds kinda like you're underestimating the lure of the bottom line in the free market.
ameister14 2y ago
Companies as we currently know them mostly did not exist in the 1700's. Where they did many of the biggest were monopolies granted by the government. The free market has never existed on a wide scale, so no company currently has to survive in a free market. It is a thought experiment and in practice regulated markets are far superior because the market is a pretty bad governor for society. Further, to have a free market you need perfect transparency, a state which is not realistically possible to begin with but if it were possible would only be achieved through regulation, such as disclosure requirements. In that free market, by the way, companies absolutely will poison the air and water, in large part because people do not make purchase decisions based on downstream externalities. Even if they did, they won't be able to prove the company poisoned the river and the company won't be breaking any laws so a lot of people will simply allow it to continue. Now if the products themselves were poisonous, it's possible, but historically this just led to merchants moving from town to town to poison new people who hadn't heard of them. >The reason companies do nefarious things is government interference in markets, insulating companies from competition. This is so ridiculous I am not sure you're serious now. Are you just trolling?
- pdonis 2y ago
  > The free market has never existed on a wide scale, so no company currently has to survive in a free market. But... > This is so ridiculous It is? Aren't you saying the same thing?
  - ameister14 2y ago
    Not at all. Despite the "state of nature" being theoretical, you wouldn't say that the reason people harm eachother is because of government regulations, would you? Of course you wouldn't, because you can think of a lot of reasons for people to harm eachother absent government regulation. See? You can say that the complete absence of social structure is a theoretical state and also say that the presence of government and social structure is not the sole cause for conflict.
    - pdonis 2y ago
deadbolt 2y ago
> Poisoning the air, water, and customers is bad for business. Since when?
- pdonis 2y ago
  > Since when? Since as long as people haven't wanted polluted air and water or products with harmful substances in them. "Bad for business" means business in an actual free market, where customers have the final say. In what we have now, government has the final say, and government sucks at actually protecting us from these things. Or haven't you noticed that our air, water, and products still have all sorts of harmful things in them, despite all the government regulation?
  - beej71 2y ago
    Surely you remember what it was like in LA in the 70s compared to now!
relaxing 2y ago
> Or haven't you noticed that our air, water, and products still have all sorts of harmful things in them, despite all the government regulation? Do you twiddle your mustache and snicker maniacally as you think up these specious arguments? Or are you parroting them from those who do?
- pdonis 2y ago
  Since you ask, I actually prefer to breathe heavily and intone "I find your lack of faith disturbing."