Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't think the merger should have been approved, but once that bell is rung I think the standard for judicial intervention needs to be very high

Why? What particular harm are you worried about here? If there's harm to market participants then why should the players be immune? Why is a merger approval so inviolate?

> and I don't think bare market forces apply.

Why _wouldn't_ they? What forces _would_ you invoke to achieve justice? Or are you saying that because it's too inconvenient, we have to ignore the harms?

Market's don't exist for the benefit of companies. They exist for the benefit of citizens who both participate in them as consumers and as laborers. We wrote a lot of anti monopoly law for very good reasons, if shareholders are inconvenienced by having to unwind bad deals that shouldn't have been approved in the first place, I see no reason to afford them greater protection or deference than the fundamental participants of that market.

Exactly. Companies should be the servants, not the masters, of civil society.

> Why?

Because changing rulings is by itself a bad thing that harms economic predictability

Why is economic predictability good if it has bad outcomes?

If the outcomes were shown to be worse across the board, sure, it would be worth sacrificing predictability for better outcomes. But if we set the precedent of rolling back merger approvals after the fact, I see good reason to believe that the effects on the market would be worse overall than if we just let this bad outcome be a single bad outcome.

If we want mergers to be undoable, that needs to be clear at the time of approval. We could probably fix this going forward to strike a better balance between predictability and other outcomes, but we have to make the contingencies known in advance, not pull rugs three years later.

Yeah but why.

What about the idea that unlawful things remain unlawful even if someone gets away with them for a little while.

That seems pretty logically consistent too.

Are there any allegations of unlawful behavior here? If so, sure, let's make sure there are consequences! But those consequences should be consistent for any company engaging in said behaviors, regardless of whether they were recently merged.

Yeah what’s what a lawsuit means, that someone is alleging unlawful behavior.

It’s a lawsuit, litigated by lawyers, in a court of law. You may see a three letter word reappearing if you look closely.

Every court case starts with a document that lists the actions of the defendant while citing the specific laws (statute or tort) alleged to have been violated.

As a general rule laws are enforced after the fact by a harmed party asking courts to provide a remedy. In the case of criminal law the party is the people, represented by the state, in the case of civil law it’s often a private individual, group, or organization.

This is the normal way laws are applied. People break them and then someone takes them to court to unwind the damage and seek redress.

You missed my actual point, but the sarcasm is noted:

> But those consequences should be consistent for any company engaging in said behaviors, regardless of whether they were recently merged.

The consequences are consistent. If they engage in an illegal merger and someone sues them they'll be subject to the remedy of that court.

It's really not that complicated. That's how civil and business law is typically enforced.

Your premise is that when a business deal is "approved" it's all set. But that's not really how things generally work, your premise is dubious. The real way things work is people do things and then if they cause unlawful harm they end up getting sued, sometimes by the justice department sometimes by a class action sometimes by someone else.

You may want markets to exist for the benefit of citizens as labor and consumers only. But that's not an agreed upon position. If there is no benefit for humans as investors, markets won't exist. Companies are legal fictions created for humans as investors to pool their capital today and turn it into more capital for tomorrow.

> If there is no benefit for humans as investors, markets won't exist.

This is so breathtakingly wrong, that 'Earth is flat' is more accurate.

Ten thousand years ago, before investors, central banks, before currency, before the concept of money, primitive people had Markets

Primordial market consists only of two peope - labourer and a customer. I trade my sheep for your fish.

Even in the modern day, many companies have no investors - for example limited partnerships.

The idea that markets would disappear without investment reads like an attempt by the pope to take credit for creating the world in 3 days.

We are talking about the modern world here, the comment was about companies and their role in a society where companies exist.. in a thread about a merger between two telcos. Comments should be read in context.

So, sure, not literally every market would disappear without investors. But the overwhelming majority of current GPD would not exist without capital. It's quite hard to name a single current business that would exist without any investors in the world. Does your business require a computer? An office? A store front? A phone? Running water? Electricity? Investors, investors, investors, investors, investors. There are various stakeholders in any business - workers, customers, capital providers, suppliers, folks who feel externalities, and so on. The idea that companies are there just for the workers and the customers is misunderstanding the complexity of the modern world. It isn't the same place it was 10,000 years ago.

And... it appears there is confusion about what a limited partnership is... Many limited partnerships exist so they can raise money from investors who want nothing more than a return on their capital. Here is a decent intro on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_partnership .. An enormous amount of current law is written to make the aggregation of capital possible and an attractive proposition. Society generally understands how important it is to make investment attractive.

Primitive people had markets but they didn’t have limited liability corporations.

The very existence of these companies is a privilege, a state provided fiction. The people get to determine the scope of that privilege.

Corporations have no innate natural rights.

Sheep for wheat?

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