Hacker News Reader

Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Imagine every single business you interact with acting exactly like this. Imagine ticketmaster, airbnb, tipping at restaurants, pre-tax/fee price tags exported into every aspect of business.

This is what a world without regulation could be.

The free market is not solving Ticketmaster and it is not solving AirBnB.

View on HN

I'd like to think that very few serious people want a truly unregulated free market. The free market can be amazing but it requires enough regulation to let it happen. We have to try and stop monopolies from forming, and break them up quickly when they do. That's the kind of regulation we need more of, not so much the regulations that dictate specific business practices.

Of course, we don't really have that at all in the US. We have a severely compromised free market.

Except how do you then compete when places like China have the state backing everything, which is basically like the world biggest monopoly?

Is there any country that doesn't have heavy subsidies/intervention in what it considers strategically important industries?

For example, the US basically has helicopters dumping cash into the agriculture industry nonstop, the CHIPS and Science Act is dumping 280 billion into semiconductors, and the petroleum industry gets around 20 billion a year.

It's not a matter of one country cheating while the others play fair, it's more like everyone cheating and some being more able to get away with it than others (RIP, Bombardier, for example).

Yeah, industrial policy historically has mostly created bad companies, which is why it fell out of favor for a while.

Even China is not foolproof at it; look at how troubled their airliner program has been.

In theory the new ideas that come from competition outweigh the efficiency/brute force of state-backed monopolies. But this depends on them not simply copying the ideas as they come.

Many things aren’t about new ideas. If you heavily subsidize raw materials, or even finished products like solar, you can own an industry. They’ve been successful at it for solar, and now own enough of the inputs that it would be difficult to not include China. They’ve generally done the same with manufacturing (including a ton of infrastructure) such that the rest of the world is now uncompetitive… especially at their scale.

The US is more productive on a per capita basis than China. We are competing just fine.

Like by a whole number factor.

Regulation is the difference between libertarianism and anarchy. People always claim to want unregulated freedom, speech is the most common example, then someone starts defaming, harassing, threatening, and sharing child porn and suddenly we get into a no true Scotsman debate about what freedom actually means. You should therefore be skeptical of anyone saying they want something completely unregulated. They are likely either lying to you or too blinded by their own biases to even understand what they are saying because almost no one wants actual anarchy.

Anarchy being the better version, with the anarchist members having to agree to such terms whereas the libertarians get to force their terms onto others by calling it property rights?

i view the need for regulations as through the lens of the seven deadly sins.

Until we can rest assured that 100% of you will treat me better than I deserve, we will have to be on the watch for pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth.

That is pretty much the world that the original Star Trek was promising--an evolved human--but we are very far away from that now.

We could also look at it through the lens of Bertrand Russell's four unquenchable desires (acquisitiveness, rivalry, pride, power).

Either way, flawed humanity needs regulations backed by overwhelming power to force us to treat each other right.

Sure it is. There are 130K+ places in the US that you can stay at that are professionally managed and legally zoned for short term stays. You don’t pay any undisclosed fees once you get there. You don’t have to worry about cleaning anything. There is no “checklist”. I just walk out of most hotels I stay at, click a button on an app and get my receipt.

You don’t have to worry about being rated by your host and you know the exact address before you book.

Airbnb used to be VC subsidized and cheap. Now that it's the same cost or more than a hotel room; I don't understand why someone would prefer Airbnb.

Kids, people have kids and kids nap. It’s a nightmare trying to find a hotel that has a suite with a door between the bedroom and the rest of the room. Leaving you to either book adjoining rooms or calling hotels until you find one that has that. And typically at that price point it’s cheaper to stay in an Airbnb.

Embassy Suites and Homewood Suites are two that I know about. All Embassy Suites have two room suites with a separate bedroom and most have a sleeper sofa.

Another point regarding kids is it can be a lot easier to find an AirBnB and cook their favorite or required dishes (my son had bad stomach problems early in his life and needed a very bland diet) rather than try your luck 3 times a day at a random restaurant.

There are plenty of hotels with full kitchens. Homewood Suites has a full kitchen as do many other extended stays.

Not sharing a wall I guess.

We prefer to stay in houses/cottages on vacations. Two bedrooms, kitchen, dishwasher, laundry. You can't have it in most hotels.

That’s the free market working as it should. You under your own volition choose the trade offs between hotels and AirBnbs.

With externalities thrust upon the neighbors

I agree completely. AirBnb goes out of its way to allow hosts to skirt regulations.

The government’s job even with “free market capitalism” is to regulate the market to manage both positive and negative externalities.

It's like how Uber utterly murdered the taxi industry. That kind of thing simply doesn't happen to an entrenched incumbent market player who doesn't have it coming.

As for regulations, when regulations fail to keep up with reality, well, guess who wins. If you want to tell your neighbor what she can do with her house, I guess maybe you should've outbid her when it went up for sale.

In the Phoenix area where I stayed a couple of weeks ago, I was easily able to rent an entire house for what fairly-crappy hotel rooms are going for.

People say this a lot, but I don’t know why. Airbnbs are consistently cheaper pretty much everywhere I’ve traveled, so much so that I wouldn’t have even been able to visit many cities if I needed to pay for a hotel.

Nowadays it’s common for hotels to charge “resort fees” or “location fees”. Like airbnb’s cleaning fees, these are disclosed during checkout but often don’t appear in comparison shopping sites or advertisements.

At least they are disclosed during checkout and there isn’t a checklist of things you should do to avoid paying extra when you leave.

Free market with ground rules works well.

Better than a “pure” free market or the Soviet-style, centrally-planned economies.

Though the ecological disaster from short-term thinking really needs to be rethought.

Free market requires perfect information. If airbnb showed the final price, and sorted by it, the situation would improve a lot.

Forcing airbnb to display and sort by final price is the type of regulation that would help.

No. You’ve got it backward. Regulation requires perfect information to get it right. Free markets adjust to new information much quicker than governments.

Airbnb could easily solve the issue by standardizing a level service and expectations. They could do what Amazon does when merchants don’t follow their market place best practices and hide the “book” button under a “other booking options” link. They won’t though and they’ll continue to burn through their customers who are unhappy with the experience.

wait, you're saying that amazon is aware of shit vendors on their platform? you're continuing to say that they don't actually remove them but just hide them? you're implying that amazon is complicit in not eliminating bad actors? /s

> The free market is not solving Ticketmaster and it is not solving AirBnB.

The whole reason Ticketmaster is able to do what they're able to do is because when one company becomes large enough, it's no longer a free market.

Ticketmaster specifically lobbied, contracted and purchased their way into near monopoly. Those contracts for sure really helped to block other free-market participants from entering the ticketing game.

Heh, go to restaurant, leave 25% tip, but also before you leave please rinse dirty dishes and put them in the dishwasher.

what was stopping hotels from already doing this?

not sure how rhetorical you're being, but...regulations ;-)

this is exactly why companies like airbnb, uber, and the other disruptors try so damn hard to not be lumped in with the exact market they are trying to disrupt. they all know that if they had to play by the same rules, there would be no disrupting. the disruption comes from them being allowed to skirt the rules and play on different playing fields. they'll all scream about corruption in the existing sytem, and some of that might very well be true, they are suggesting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. it is true that some regulations that help protect the consumer will hinder unbridled growth for the disruptor. tough!

fancy location hotels tack on often "resort fees" but the vast majority of normal ones don't. is that the result of regulations?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com