>and now we have a situation where a little girl gets raided for selling lemonade without a license.
Source, I'm actually curious?
But the real point is that yes, overarching government power is bad. But so is overarching corporate power. There seems to be this belief that the free market is perfectly self correcting, which in theory is true, but in practice isn't. There's a power differential between (large) corporations and individuals in their ability to organize, act, and finance their goals. As a result, large corporations will always be implicitly more powerful than groups of people, even quite large groups.
>And how does the government know more than the consumers? Are they privy to secret information?
Well, yes, essentially. A corporation has no reason to allow me, a private consumer to inspect it. I will have no way to verify that this cheese I'm getting is real or filled with sawdust. So you say, a corporation pops up that inspects the cheese and gives it a seal of approval. Perfect now I can trust my cheese. But how am I to know whether or not the cheese manufacturer is bribing the cheese-authenticating-company?
Or how will the cheese-authenticating-company even get off the ground, it needs to buy thousands of dollars in chemical testing and lab equipment. I have no incentive as a consumer to pay such a company if I think my cheese is fine. So the only chance such a company has of being successful is once consumers realize there is a major problem with the quality of cheese, by which point its too late.
Compare this to the FDA, who can say "let us inspect you and your food" and have the force of legal consequence for saying "no". Then, they're funded by taxes, meaning that even if I personally have no reason to pay them because I think my cheese is fine, I still pay a few dollars to keep the FDA around making sure my cheese is up to snuff.
>manufacturers are responding to consumer demand by removing transfat from their products without needing to be coerced by the government.
And the only reason we know about the contents of food is because of government mandated ingredient lists and labels. Without such government regulations, we'd be even more in the dark about the contents of food.
>which they are in a free market
Sure, if they are willing to spend time and effort to compare and investigate a (technically infinite in a true free market) number of products. Most consumers aren't willing to do this, even if they are able. Take open source software. I'm a user of various pieces of OSS. I've never audited any of the pieces of open source software I use. I could, but I don't have the time and am unwilling to develop the expertise to judge the python interpreter or LibreOffice or openSSL. And that's in an otherwise perfect situation, where I have full access to information. What about when I don't, or when there are 500 minor forks of openSSL that all do things slightly differently and I need to choose the best one for me. A perfect free market isn't feasible, there's too much information to work with.
I mean hell even if openSSL develops as the major one and everyone uses it, now we've got a near-monopoly, and someone who realizes that there's a problem in openSSL that they are unwilling to fix, and lets say its a fundamental issue, well now they have to build something new from the ground up, but it also has to match openSSLs api exactly because otherwise it will never be adopted, the cost of conversion is too high. And it'll take time for information about the problem to spread, and time to develop the alternative, and time for adoption to occur, and...this person needs to make money while developing this alternative somehow.
And that's in a situation with perfect information, extremely low market barriers, and a generally good natured monopoly who isn't acting to intentionally stump out competition.
>you need to clarify this.
Entering a market that has a natural economy of scale is nearly impossible unless you have a huge amount of resources already to throw at the problem. Take telecom. Telecom sucks in the US. We've broken up telcos because they're such natural monopolies, and awful. The only real company competing with telcos right now are internet based alternatives, and google, which is also an enormous company and piggybacked off of prior work by the telcos (dark fiber) to do what it is doing.
There's no way I could compete in that market, even if I promised services thousands of times better than current options. I don't have the resources to purchase 100ft of underground fiber cable, much less lay it.
Source, I'm actually curious?
But the real point is that yes, overarching government power is bad. But so is overarching corporate power. There seems to be this belief that the free market is perfectly self correcting, which in theory is true, but in practice isn't. There's a power differential between (large) corporations and individuals in their ability to organize, act, and finance their goals. As a result, large corporations will always be implicitly more powerful than groups of people, even quite large groups.
>And how does the government know more than the consumers? Are they privy to secret information?
Well, yes, essentially. A corporation has no reason to allow me, a private consumer to inspect it. I will have no way to verify that this cheese I'm getting is real or filled with sawdust. So you say, a corporation pops up that inspects the cheese and gives it a seal of approval. Perfect now I can trust my cheese. But how am I to know whether or not the cheese manufacturer is bribing the cheese-authenticating-company?
Or how will the cheese-authenticating-company even get off the ground, it needs to buy thousands of dollars in chemical testing and lab equipment. I have no incentive as a consumer to pay such a company if I think my cheese is fine. So the only chance such a company has of being successful is once consumers realize there is a major problem with the quality of cheese, by which point its too late.
Compare this to the FDA, who can say "let us inspect you and your food" and have the force of legal consequence for saying "no". Then, they're funded by taxes, meaning that even if I personally have no reason to pay them because I think my cheese is fine, I still pay a few dollars to keep the FDA around making sure my cheese is up to snuff.
>manufacturers are responding to consumer demand by removing transfat from their products without needing to be coerced by the government.
And the only reason we know about the contents of food is because of government mandated ingredient lists and labels. Without such government regulations, we'd be even more in the dark about the contents of food.
>which they are in a free market
Sure, if they are willing to spend time and effort to compare and investigate a (technically infinite in a true free market) number of products. Most consumers aren't willing to do this, even if they are able. Take open source software. I'm a user of various pieces of OSS. I've never audited any of the pieces of open source software I use. I could, but I don't have the time and am unwilling to develop the expertise to judge the python interpreter or LibreOffice or openSSL. And that's in an otherwise perfect situation, where I have full access to information. What about when I don't, or when there are 500 minor forks of openSSL that all do things slightly differently and I need to choose the best one for me. A perfect free market isn't feasible, there's too much information to work with.
I mean hell even if openSSL develops as the major one and everyone uses it, now we've got a near-monopoly, and someone who realizes that there's a problem in openSSL that they are unwilling to fix, and lets say its a fundamental issue, well now they have to build something new from the ground up, but it also has to match openSSLs api exactly because otherwise it will never be adopted, the cost of conversion is too high. And it'll take time for information about the problem to spread, and time to develop the alternative, and time for adoption to occur, and...this person needs to make money while developing this alternative somehow.
And that's in a situation with perfect information, extremely low market barriers, and a generally good natured monopoly who isn't acting to intentionally stump out competition.
>you need to clarify this.
Entering a market that has a natural economy of scale is nearly impossible unless you have a huge amount of resources already to throw at the problem. Take telecom. Telecom sucks in the US. We've broken up telcos because they're such natural monopolies, and awful. The only real company competing with telcos right now are internet based alternatives, and google, which is also an enormous company and piggybacked off of prior work by the telcos (dark fiber) to do what it is doing.
There's no way I could compete in that market, even if I promised services thousands of times better than current options. I don't have the resources to purchase 100ft of underground fiber cable, much less lay it.