> Tobacco advertising, pollution, lead gasoline... Clearly we do make moral choices and, as a democracy, pass laws restricting some activities.
We do, but I think it's rare, and much rarer than that list would imply. I see most of those as clear issues of public health. The one where that's a harder claim to make, advertising, it's about making the market function better. Free markets requires require widely distributed and accurate information to function correctly, and false information is extremely damaging to a free market.
> I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.
Neither am I. I'm not some free market only anti-regulation type. I think a completely unregulated market is trivially shown to be unworkable by our own history, so regulation is required to curtail blatant market manipulation. I even think more regulation restricting the size of large companies (or disincentivizing them) would be useful, but I think they need to be applied to foreign companies as well or we're just hurting ourselves without solving any problem.
There's probably a hundred ways that is infeasible and has problems, but it's obvious there are real problems to address with inequality and outsized companies with outsized influence, and something needs to change. I'm just hesitant to couch it in moral terms when it comes to what the government can and should do, because I think that's a slippery slope.
We do, but I think it's rare, and much rarer than that list would imply. I see most of those as clear issues of public health. The one where that's a harder claim to make, advertising, it's about making the market function better. Free markets requires require widely distributed and accurate information to function correctly, and false information is extremely damaging to a free market.
> I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.
Neither am I. I'm not some free market only anti-regulation type. I think a completely unregulated market is trivially shown to be unworkable by our own history, so regulation is required to curtail blatant market manipulation. I even think more regulation restricting the size of large companies (or disincentivizing them) would be useful, but I think they need to be applied to foreign companies as well or we're just hurting ourselves without solving any problem.
There's probably a hundred ways that is infeasible and has problems, but it's obvious there are real problems to address with inequality and outsized companies with outsized influence, and something needs to change. I'm just hesitant to couch it in moral terms when it comes to what the government can and should do, because I think that's a slippery slope.