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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

> The price is a proxy for materials and energy required to produce the product.

You're right. Prices reveal true preference and constraints. The market is a machine for answering the question "What should we be working on?". Sometimes, people don't like the answers the market produces and invent justifications for distorting or ignoring price signals. In the limit, this practice amounts to a command economy. Disregarding price signals makes us all worse off and we shouldn't do it.

If something is expensive, that means it's scarce, and if it isn't, that means it isn't. If there's some negative externality you think the market isn't capturing, well, capture that externality. Put a number on it; don't make it a moral issue. It's only through numbers that we understand the world.

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> If there's some negative externality you think the market isn't capturing, well, capture that externality. Put a number on it; don't make it a moral issue.

The problem is that the people not paying for these externalities don't want to, have no incentive to, and are not required to. They lobby to avoid laws and regulations that would make them do it.

So meanwhile we have people dying due to air and water pollution created by people who don't want to pay for their externalities. FooCorp doesn't care if the country's health care costs go up because of that; they still make more money than they would if they had to pay for their externalities.

The economic argument doesn't work, so it's a little hard not to frame it as a moral issue instead.

> The problem is that the people not paying for these externalities don't want to, have no incentive to, and are not required to. They lobby to avoid laws and regulations that would make them do it.

Perhaps the externalities are exaggerated then? If you say something is scarce and the market says it's abundant, who's right? You? Why?

The fact is that Lego isn't, to any meaningful degree, contributing to adverse outcomes by using petroleum as a feedstock. The market tells them they got the right answer. Their oil use is a drop in the bucket. They shouldn't feel pressured to worsen their product over moral and aesthetic pressure from activists.

> The economic argument doesn't work, so it's a little hard not to frame it as a moral issue instead.

The market is working just fine. The trouble is that the moralizers don't like the priority stack rank the market produces and seek to use various forms of non-market power to get the outcomes they want. People doing this makes us all worse off. Trust the market.

>Trust the market.

We do not.

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