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Comment by dopylitty | Hacker News Reader

It's important to realize even if there was specific malfeasance in the companies involved in this particular event the problems are systemic.

We are part of an economic system that values profits for a small number of people above safety or quality.

While it's important to punish those who behave unethically a better response would be to change the system so that ethical behavior and the pursuits of safety and quality are valued above the pursuit of wealth.

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Fire related deaths have been falling for decades in the UK so that system must be working.

Nicely phrased, agree. Ethics is key.

I'll take the bait:

How do you propose we do that, if all currently known systems of government are insufficient?

Not OP, but I don’t read it as bait, and I don’t think having a solution in mind is a prerequisite for noting a problem.

As for your question, ideas like UBI, post-growth capitalism, etc seem to move towards relaxing the ethics vs profit dilemmas that systematically drive these disasters (as well as most of the other slow-motion disasters like climate change, biodiversity loss, etc).

You’re just repeating Tyler Cowen’s libertarian fallacy of assuming the quality of government is constant. A far more interesting question would be testing that belief, which could then lead to you learning which countries do better and why.

Perhaps rather than focusing on very broad systems of government, we could look at changing the system of fire regulation and inspection. There's ground in between "blame individuals" and "blame capitalism".

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