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comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  1425 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I Love Corporations

    If you lie to a corporation about your personal information, that might be called "insurance fraud," for which there are absolutely ramifications.

This is only true if I am a customer of the insurance company, which implies that I have agreed in advance to their terms of service. I would expect consequences if I try to cheat the insurance company, and would hold them responsible if they try to cheat me.

EDIT: I can also file a fraudulent claim against another person's policy. That is an example of bad behavior by an individual. How does the corporation respond? Hopefully, the insurance company protects its customers by denying the claim. But sniffing out fraud costs money, so they will sometimes pay out when they shouldn't. A competitive insurance company will seek an optimal level of fraud detection to keep customer premiums as low as possible. The government also has a role, to punish people who commit insurance fraud. An industry source suggests that enforcement is minimal, so "Fraud comprises about 10 percent of property-casualty insurance losses and loss adjustment expenses each year."

    Much like an insurance company, the government compels us to pay a certain amount

No insurance company compels me to pay anything. I am only obligated to pay for insurance that I agree to purchase. I can cancel my policy and stop paying any time I like. It's the government that operates on the basis of compulsion.

    That's called social contract.

As Huemer says, "I understand the arguments that this institution is necessary." But I think the concept bears some scrutiny. My idea of a contract is an agreement made between two parties, in which each side promises to fulfill some obligations. It should be written down somewhere, so everyone understands what the terms are. And most importantly, the parties should consciously agree to the contract. None of this is true of the social contract. We should call it the social tradition.

Huemer makes the case succinctly in a précis of his book: Sam has a problem.

    "But what if I don't want to" has never been a compelling argument to me

"But what if I don't want to tell a stranger about my salary and ethnicity and who I live with?"

"But what if I don't want to sell the house I grew up in to make room for a bypass?"

"But what if I don't want to risk my life shooting at foreigners in a war I believe is unjust?"

"But what if I don't want to arrest a fugitive slave so they will be returned to the South?"

Surely you support occasional resistance to legal authority. The state is not infallible.

The question of political authority is probably a book-length subject. I try to argue that there are cases where the market could provide better outcomes than we now get from government, though neither is perfect. It's true that the market underproduces public goods, since it is hard to profit from them, but providing public goods is a small fraction of what government does.

    You opened a previous portion of the discussion describing how Walmart might increase market share simply by improving their overall customer experience. The implication, I presume, was to illustrate how beautifully the market self-regulates through positive interactions to make both sides prosper. But it ignored malfeasance, because malfeasance illustrates how in the absence of regulation, the market cares only about profit by all available means.

A market requires two sides, buyer and seller. The seller cares only about profit. But the buyer doesn't care about the seller's profit at all, and tends to push in the direction of less profit and less malfeasance, against the buyer at least.

Do you feel Walmart depends significantly on malfeasance for their profits? The complaints I see most are that they drive a hard bargain with their workers and suppliers. This is entirely due to their business strategy of providing the lowest possible prices to customers, who benefit. You mentioned intellectual property protection, that's a hard one to get right, and even if the IP laws are optimal it's difficult to enforce them. bfv noted the shift toward open source software, perhaps in response to the fact that it's hard to sell code so tech companies are shifting toward selling services.

    As for monopolies, they decidedly don't result in cheaper diapers.

Can you cite an example of a harmful monopoly from this century? The first article I found complains that "three companies control about 80% of mobile telecoms." Did Forbes forget what "mono-" means?

    When governments misbehave, they do stuff like murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians.... And I don’t mean in some indirect or speculative way — I mean literally sending employees with guns to go shoot people.... If there were a corporation that did shit like that, people on all sides of the political spectrum would condemn it as the most evil corporation ever.