Hacker News Reader

The author isn't arguing to ban traditional dealerships; he's trying to remove state laws that mandate the bundling of sales, service, delivery, etc. together. If the traditional model makes sense in some places, it will continue. But given that no other consumer good is sold that way, it is likely that both producers and consumers will prefer an unbundled experience.

The state has other constituents besides the individual citizens. These laws have very sound reasoning and prevent very real and very big problems. Blindly running around, finding things to "disrupt" is not admirable. In fact, it's the opposite.

In fact it does not. Governments exist solely to provide for people. Everything else you've heard about -- companies, organizations, interest groups, etc. -- are fictions that exist to help or hurt the interests of individual people.

What you have in car dealerships is a classic example of regulatory capture [0], where most people don't buy a car that often, so they're not particularly focused on dealer laws. But dealers have all the incentive in the world to lobby for restrictive rules. And, since dealers are by their nature distributed, and often have the proceeds to be "good community citizens" (e.g., sponsor a little league team), their views have even more weight.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Nevertheless, they do exist and are constituents whether you like it or not.

You don't legislate away their property at all. You legislate away their government protected monopoly, allowing for new competition and new business models.

What about the jobs? Is the argument that they don't serve any legitimate purpose, such that they'd go away if they're not forced to be kept around through legislation? Jobs aren't a good reason to favor stagnation over dynamism in an economy. Improvements in productivity have led to drastically more jobs over time, rather than less, the same would be true in this case. Plus, the existing dealers would continue to have a leg up on sales and distribution, it would take a long time to build out any competing systems.

Shouldn't you have a free market economy? Where a customer is able to choose between a dealer or a direct sale company?

The customer is the one that should be able to choose between a cheaper price with a lower service, or a higher price with more service. The problem here is that companies want to provide the cheap alternative but aren't allowed to do so.

If a dealer cannot compete with a direct sale company on price and service, doesn't that make their business model flawed/outdated.

I agree in theory, but the reality is that these companies made large investments under one set of legislation.

If a society flips and completely changes the economic/legislative landscape under which companies operate, it creates a very unstable business environment and discourages capex especially.

This would not be good for the long term economic health.

They made large investments under laws they lobbied for and made by politicians that were paid for. I have no qualms reversing a horrific abuse of lobbying and actions of unethical state congress members. They got to benefit from this farce for decades, it's time to shut it down.

"Let It Burn" is not the most airtight of analyses of a complex economic system.

It's not like they would repeal the law and all private dealerships would be shut down the next day. They would continue as usual, probably for several years, and most would eventually get phased out. It's not letting it burn, it's just letting it die the death it should have died decades ago.

That's like saying that Comcast and Verizon accepted public money to roll out infrastructure and invested their money in it. Therefore, we probably shouldn't address their artificial monopoly, because they invested money in their monopoly.

Laws change. Invested money by big corporations is not a valid reason to keep them. In fact it's pretty sad that this would even be a point of consideration.

Laws can and are written with long-term timelines in mind. If you're dismantling X, Y and Z, you could specify that X kicks in two years from now, Y starts five years from now, and Z won't kick in until seven years has passed.

Removing protectionist laws that allow certain businesses to flourish by restricting competition should only create uncertainty in other areas where there are similar laws. I don't believe there are many such areas. The only other industry I can think of where there are mandated middlemen is alcohol, and it would be great to fix that too.

> You certainly cannot legislate away their property without compensation. What about the jobs? That is no small number. With those go all the local taxes, benefits, and such as well.

Whoa. Nobody is "taking over" the dealerships. What is being discussed is changing the laws that protect their monopoly.

Modifying the law to allow Dis-integrated deliver of sales and service is not going to mean a massive loss of jobs. Dealerships still have huge services businesses that will continue to thrive.

If you want that then pay for it. Don't force it onto everyone via legislation.

Just remove the protectionist support they have and then let the market have its way.