Comment by germandiago | Hacker News Reader

Comment by germandiago | Hacker News Reader

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Public position = gate to corruption, license and regulation = gate to corruption. Do not expect the ones who make the laws to make them against themselves. That is idealist thinking.

If history teqches something is that the more of those, the more corruption and handing of favors and "legal corruption" pops up.

It is not by chance. It is just bc of how incentives are aligned. Those incentives, IMHO, can only be destroyed by strong deregulation and privatization. I dnt know how much of it but certainly a country should not be 45-50% or more GDP going public. Besides that centralized planning (we r going towards that) is usually super inefficient. So it is also a technical problem.

More when the peoople to arrange budgets do not pay a penalty even for their corruption in many cases, let alone for their management mistakes. Lagarde is still there and she gets 400.000 eur per year and took the decisios that made us go to these levels of inflation...on top of that she was involved in a corruption case that prescribed (not sure is the appropriate term in english, translated from spanish) I am no economist but I knew what would happen very likely... do they really pull our leg? I think so honestly.

problem is deregulation and privatisation doesn't work either, because then instead of corrupt politicians who make decisions based on greed despite being told not to, you get CEOs and big corporations who make decisions based on profit (essentially greed) because that is their entire purpose

If you look a bit deeper though; you'll find that greed can lead to good and bad outcomes. People make decisions because in some sense they feel like they will profit personally. That is basically the same as saying they do things for reasons. We know that most people aren't especially principled because they are regularly tested and don't make principle-based decisions. Nevertheless there is a great deal of good in the world.

Corporations are greedy, but they operate in a world where it is hard for them to enrich themselves without enriching others too.

how is this different/better for corporations than for politicians? Also how do corporations, that focus their efforts on using the cheapest possible production methods regardless of effects on the environments or peoples' health, paying their workers the absolute minimum for them to continue living, and paying their shareholders the absolute maximum amount 'enrich others' by accident?

Not that I am defending corrupt politicians, I just really don't know what to do about this, and looking at all the bad things corporations do i can't comprehend how they would suddenly become good when even less regulated than they already are

Corporations in a free market offer products and services. Politicians coercion.

They do not improve your life objetively, usually they do not pay for the price of them when there is a mistake but get benefits from trafficking favors.

> you get CEOs and big corporations who make decisions based on profit (essentially greed) because that is their entire purpose

That would be fine if you had hundreds of CEOs competing in a market. Unfortunately they tend to merge and create monopolies. And some people salute this because of the growth at all costs mindset.

What else in nature grows at all costs? Oh right, cancer.

Profit is not greed when you serve people with products and services. Or if it is greed, regulation and corruption is not another kind of greed even worse? No service, no product, no benefit for anyone.

If there is benefit in a regulation, the person imposing it is not the person paying the negative outcomes of it. Never. So no, CEOs competing cannot get more than what they generate unless they distort the market in some way.

Splitting power. That's the key.

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