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Those who are pro-market probably consider the companies cropping up to be evidence that legislation is not needed (as the market is addressing the issue). I'm not such a person, fwiw.


I would definitely consider myself pro-market, and "market > government" has proven itself a pretty good default time and time again. That doesn't mean nothing should ever be regulated.


I don't think any free market capitalist outside of the most extreme libertarians think that markets should be completely unregulated. It is well known that free markets have areas where they are market failures or can never be Pareto efficient. Basically any "tragedy of the commons" type scenario is such a case. Unfortunately governments like to get their grubby fingers into everything and try to regulate their way out of problems.


yeah, it's a failure mode of the open market. "We've allowed services to exist that unnecessarily cost you money so the solution is more services that will take more money." If we're being honest, at some point the golden cow of Efficiency is undermined.

The societal ethics of Ozempic are an example of this. We've created policies and subsidies that flood the food market with unhealthy processed food to the point that the cheapest option is an unnatural amount of calories (compare US obesity rates to the rest of the world), so the solution is a pharma product that takes an additional cut of your wallet. It's an expensive solution to an expensive problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.

The software analogy is it's always easier to slap on one more piece of duct tape tech debt than to do the difficult thing and refactor the whole thing (acknowledging that part of the refactoring difficulty is you're not guaranteed to end up in a better state than you started from...)


The do-not-call list was created under Bush 2, right?


More pragmatically, the fact that such a business exists might be a sign that we're too late to regulate this. Now there is a constituency who can use the profits from keeping the system broken to lobby to keep the system broken. Look at TurboTax as an example, or defense contracting reform, or the affordable care act. Within the rules of neoliberal capitalism, you can't really use the government to address problems that somebody somewhere is making money from.


Broken window fallacy




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