4 ms·

> Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers. That wasn't always true. The Robinson-

by autoexec 10mo ago

> Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers. That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. The US just stopped enforcing the law (and also anti-trust laws that would have protected local/small businesses) so here we are. At any point the US could decide that enough is enough and fix the situation but we'd probably have to make it actually illegal for corporations to bribe government officials before it stands a chance of happening.

eftychis 10mo ago
It used to be illegal to bribe. Used to... Make a law impossible to enforce, and you suddenly transform the act to a totally legal one, at the expense of people losing trust in the system (specifically the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress). And at some point, the system breaks.
- gruez 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
    Lobbying involves quid-pro-quo: You pass the bill we wrote for ourselves and we give you a cushy consulting job when you leave Congress.
    - eru 10mo ago
      As Matt Levine points out, the revolving door often works in more interesting ways. If you are a bureaucrat, the way to maximise your next paycheck is often to be especially tough on companies (and on the margin push for more complicated rules that you can be an expert in). Simplified, the logic is "See how tough I am, you better give me a good paycheck to make sure I'm playing on your team." The beauty is: the bureaucrats at the regulator don't even need to consciously think this way. They can be tough out of the ideological and conscientious conviction at the bottom of their heart, and the mechanism that gives them comparatively higher pay afterwards still works. Being tough also raises your profile, when you are but a junior or middling drone. The logic you are describing might work, but only for the most senior appointees who already have a high profile.
      - pksebben 10mo ago
        the logic they describe does work. A lot. The Rollback of Dodd-Frank [0]. Recent malpractice reform (in the wrong direction) [1]. Drilling leases [2]. Asbestos. And so on and so on [3]. Tiger's in the house, y'all. And the roof is on fire. And the water is unavailable because it all got sold to nestle [4]. 0 - https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/243973620/when-lobbyists-literally-write-the-bill https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/24397... 1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/in-trump-era-lobbyists-boldly-take-credit-for-writing-a-bill-to-protect-their-industry/2017/07/31/eb299a7c-5c34-11e7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/in-trump-era-lobbyi... 2 - https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/its-common-for-lobbyists-to-write-bills-for-congress-heres-why/ https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/its-common-for-lobbyists-to... 3 - https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/you-elected-them-to-write-new-laws-theyre-letting-corporations-do-it-instead/ https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas... 4 - https://kitoconnell.com/2016/09/27/nestle-spent-11m-lobbying-congress-control-water-cocoa-trade-since-2013/ https://kitoconnell.com/2016/09/27/nestle-spent-11m-lobbying...
  - mapontosevenths 10mo ago
    > altering your stance on a given position to maximize donations you'd collect Money exchanged to alter the conduct of a person in position of power... That sounds familiar. I wonder if there's a name for that? "Bribe: money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bribe https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bribe
    - venturecruelty 10mo ago
      Don't you see, someone just has to say "this is not a bribe", and, like magic, they can finagle their way out of their corruption. "Bribery" has a very narrow definition, which conveniently doesn't apply to the corruption in question.
    - Incipient 10mo ago
      It's clearly not a bribe. The politicians change their judgement/conduct BEFORE the money is given or promised (in anticipation of) so it's fine. ..../s (you know, because what's serious these days is hard to tell) Y'all in the US are so, so cactus haha.
      - gruez 10mo ago
        >Y'all in the US are so, so cactus haha. Are there any countries that don't use the quid pro quo definition of bribery? At best, they try to keep a lid on it by capping campaign contributions, but that's not really "bribery is illegal" (if we accept the more liberal definition), more like "there's a limit on how much you can bribe".
        anjel 10mo ago
        The Ottoman Empire kind of acknowledged the futility of trying to suppress corruption, opting instead to codify it and set thresholds for excessive abuse. Progressive for its day, it only partially succeeded since enforcement was no less prone to corrupt influence. As the romans famously said, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Literally: “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
  - Buttons840 10mo ago
    There are "bribes" and then there are "bribes as recognized by the law". We all know bribes happen, but for the law to recognize a bribe as a bribe basically requires the two parties to have a signed and notorized legal document statating that they are knowingly entering into a quid pro quo, and that both parties are aware it's illegal to do so. Anything less than this, and it will never be prosecuted.
  - z3phyr 10mo ago
    But anything more than 1 vote assigned for your usage is quid pro quo (since you will get to enjoy policies that you "paid" for) when others only get a single vote.
re-thc 10mo ago
> That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal "Legality" has never stopped big companies from doing these things. Google, Apple, Meta, etc has been receiving fines all day long and they still continue what they do.
- mlhpdx 10mo ago
  I imagine a world sometimes where punitive measures reflect the scope of crimes. If steal from a person is 1 year, then stealing from 1000 is 10 years and from a million is a lifetime. That’d put the end to political shenanigans, in my imagination.
- JoeAltmaier 10mo ago
  Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company, fined a thousand bucks for every native rock drawing they destroy? They counted them up, paid the fine, and blasted a road through. All gone. Fines becomes a business calculation. Not a deterrent, not if it matters to the big corporation. Which at some scale, it will become cost-effective.
  - re-thc 10mo ago
    > Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company There's the problem. Australia doesn't scale... not the fines. In Australia, there are a lot of rules, a lot of fines but not much to gain.
    - machomaster 10mo ago
      Is this a specific jab at something? I don't understand you comment, please elaborate.
  - QuantumGood 10mo ago
    A "fine" or "tax" is not necessarly regulation, in that it can be avoided, as in paid for by other actions, or gamed. Regulation should be though of as an input to cause a result in a scenario. Work backwards from the desired result, accounting for gaming the system, to attempt a regulation action. Of course, politicians are motivated only to provide something, not to make it effective.
coldtea 10mo ago
>The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. Price collusion is illegal too, but happens all the time. There being a law for it just makes the rare fine a cost of doing business.
- potatototoo99 10mo ago
  Not if the penalty is severe enough. Mass murder is also illegal and we make sure we don't have repeat offenders.
  - autoexec 10mo ago
    I wish that were true, but mass murderers like Johnson & Johnson, DuPont, Philip Morris, the Sackler family, etc. are allowed to keep on killing people and face no meaningful consequences for the deaths they cause. With enough money you can be a serial killer for decades and get away with it.
    - machomaster 10mo ago
      If money is people (as per the Citizens United vs. FEC decision of 2010), meaning that companies can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections since restrictions "cannot" be imposed on individuals like humans and companies), then surely things like incarceration and the death penalty should also be an option for serious offenders.
- dismantlethesun 10mo ago
  Corporate punishments can be applied on a fine grain. Every store, every instance, every choice becoming a 10k fine can rapidly make even relatively rare acts untenable as a cost of doing business.
everdev 10mo ago
There's too many people here voting against regulation and enforcement, to their own detriment. They have no idea what they're actually doing, they're just run on propaganda from the greedy.

eftychis 10mo ago

It used to be illegal to bribe. Used to... Make a law impossible to enforce, and you suddenly transform the act to a totally legal one, at the expense of people losing trust in the system (specifically the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress). And at some point, the system breaks.

gruez 10mo ago
[flagged]
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
  Lobbying involves quid-pro-quo: You pass the bill we wrote for ourselves and we give you a cushy consulting job when you leave Congress.
  - eru 10mo ago
    As Matt Levine points out, the revolving door often works in more interesting ways. If you are a bureaucrat, the way to maximise your next paycheck is often to be especially tough on companies (and on the margin push for more complicated rules that you can be an expert in). Simplified, the logic is "See how tough I am, you better give me a good paycheck to make sure I'm playing on your team." The beauty is: the bureaucrats at the regulator don't even need to consciously think this way. They can be tough out of the ideological and conscientious conviction at the bottom of their heart, and the mechanism that gives them comparatively higher pay afterwards still works. Being tough also raises your profile, when you are but a junior or middling drone. The logic you are describing might work, but only for the most senior appointees who already have a high profile.
    - pksebben 10mo ago
      the logic they describe does work. A lot. The Rollback of Dodd-Frank [0]. Recent malpractice reform (in the wrong direction) [1]. Drilling leases [2]. Asbestos. And so on and so on [3]. Tiger's in the house, y'all. And the roof is on fire. And the water is unavailable because it all got sold to nestle [4]. 0 - https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/243973620/when-lobbyists-literally-write-the-bill https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/24397... 1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/in-trump-era-lobbyists-boldly-take-credit-for-writing-a-bill-to-protect-their-industry/2017/07/31/eb299a7c-5c34-11e7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/in-trump-era-lobbyi... 2 - https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/its-common-for-lobbyists-to-write-bills-for-congress-heres-why/ https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/its-common-for-lobbyists-to... 3 - https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/you-elected-them-to-write-new-laws-theyre-letting-corporations-do-it-instead/ https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas... 4 - https://kitoconnell.com/2016/09/27/nestle-spent-11m-lobbying-congress-control-water-cocoa-trade-since-2013/ https://kitoconnell.com/2016/09/27/nestle-spent-11m-lobbying...
- mapontosevenths 10mo ago
  > altering your stance on a given position to maximize donations you'd collect Money exchanged to alter the conduct of a person in position of power... That sounds familiar. I wonder if there's a name for that? "Bribe: money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bribe https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bribe
  - venturecruelty 10mo ago
    Don't you see, someone just has to say "this is not a bribe", and, like magic, they can finagle their way out of their corruption. "Bribery" has a very narrow definition, which conveniently doesn't apply to the corruption in question.
  - Incipient 10mo ago
    It's clearly not a bribe. The politicians change their judgement/conduct BEFORE the money is given or promised (in anticipation of) so it's fine. ..../s (you know, because what's serious these days is hard to tell) Y'all in the US are so, so cactus haha.
    - gruez 10mo ago
      >Y'all in the US are so, so cactus haha. Are there any countries that don't use the quid pro quo definition of bribery? At best, they try to keep a lid on it by capping campaign contributions, but that's not really "bribery is illegal" (if we accept the more liberal definition), more like "there's a limit on how much you can bribe".
      - anjel 10mo ago
        The Ottoman Empire kind of acknowledged the futility of trying to suppress corruption, opting instead to codify it and set thresholds for excessive abuse. Progressive for its day, it only partially succeeded since enforcement was no less prone to corrupt influence. As the romans famously said, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Literally: “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
- Buttons840 10mo ago
  There are "bribes" and then there are "bribes as recognized by the law". We all know bribes happen, but for the law to recognize a bribe as a bribe basically requires the two parties to have a signed and notorized legal document statating that they are knowingly entering into a quid pro quo, and that both parties are aware it's illegal to do so. Anything less than this, and it will never be prosecuted.
- z3phyr 10mo ago
  But anything more than 1 vote assigned for your usage is quid pro quo (since you will get to enjoy policies that you "paid" for) when others only get a single vote.

re-thc 10mo ago

> That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal "Legality" has never stopped big companies from doing these things. Google, Apple, Meta, etc has been receiving fines all day long and they still continue what they do.

mlhpdx 10mo ago
I imagine a world sometimes where punitive measures reflect the scope of crimes. If steal from a person is 1 year, then stealing from 1000 is 10 years and from a million is a lifetime. That’d put the end to political shenanigans, in my imagination.
JoeAltmaier 10mo ago
Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company, fined a thousand bucks for every native rock drawing they destroy? They counted them up, paid the fine, and blasted a road through. All gone. Fines becomes a business calculation. Not a deterrent, not if it matters to the big corporation. Which at some scale, it will become cost-effective.
- re-thc 10mo ago
  > Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company There's the problem. Australia doesn't scale... not the fines. In Australia, there are a lot of rules, a lot of fines but not much to gain.
  - machomaster 10mo ago
    Is this a specific jab at something? I don't understand you comment, please elaborate.
- QuantumGood 10mo ago
  A "fine" or "tax" is not necessarly regulation, in that it can be avoided, as in paid for by other actions, or gamed. Regulation should be though of as an input to cause a result in a scenario. Work backwards from the desired result, accounting for gaming the system, to attempt a regulation action. Of course, politicians are motivated only to provide something, not to make it effective.

coldtea 10mo ago

>The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. Price collusion is illegal too, but happens all the time. There being a law for it just makes the rare fine a cost of doing business.

potatototoo99 10mo ago
Not if the penalty is severe enough. Mass murder is also illegal and we make sure we don't have repeat offenders.
- autoexec 10mo ago
  I wish that were true, but mass murderers like Johnson & Johnson, DuPont, Philip Morris, the Sackler family, etc. are allowed to keep on killing people and face no meaningful consequences for the deaths they cause. With enough money you can be a serial killer for decades and get away with it.
  - machomaster 10mo ago
    If money is people (as per the Citizens United vs. FEC decision of 2010), meaning that companies can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections since restrictions "cannot" be imposed on individuals like humans and companies), then surely things like incarceration and the death penalty should also be an option for serious offenders.
dismantlethesun 10mo ago
Corporate punishments can be applied on a fine grain. Every store, every instance, every choice becoming a 10k fine can rapidly make even relatively rare acts untenable as a cost of doing business.

everdev 10mo ago

There's too many people here voting against regulation and enforcement, to their own detriment. They have no idea what they're actually doing, they're just run on propaganda from the greedy.