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Comment by dwallin | Hacker News Reader

Ideally you decide by voting. It’s either that or you decide things by who has the most money / power / guns.

Right — we could decide whether each transaction should take place by voting on it. But that would be really inefficient! So instead, we generally let people trade with each other as long as it doesn't intrude on others.

Not sure whether Sweetgreen choosing to go cashless is an example of "decide things by who has the most money / power / guns."?

It is an example of who has the most power. If you don't have a different service that does the same for you, you'll have to suck it up or live without the service.

This becomes a big issue as soon as all services in a specific niche do 'the thing', be it refusing cash or stuff like removing headphone jacks.

At that point, what are you gonna do? Stop using products from that niche altogether?

The options are stop using them, provide them for yourself, or use the government to force others to provide it for you. Only the first two are remotely reasonable to people without entitlement issues.

With the example of smartphones not having headphone jacks - speaking from personal experience, life is harder without a smartphone. I was smartphone free for a year and ended up having to get one to use an app for a specific government service. And providing a smartphone for myself... I lack the technical knowhow to design one, and I don't think I have enough cash or connections to get one custom built.

Ironically enough, I'd be okay with government regulations mandating a headphone jack in phones.

> we could decide whether each transaction should take place by voting on it. But that would be really inefficient!

I think that "everyone else votes on whether I get to buy lunch" had more issues than just being inefficient.

Even assuming otherwise ideal conditions, choosing between two (mostly similar) political parties doesn't contain enough expressive power. Choosing goods in markets does. It's a computation problem as much as anything else.

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