Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

If you ever encounter someone who says that companies can't be policed or that government is ineffective, I want you to point them to the FTC.

For context, the current chair of the FTC is Lina Khan who is only 35 years old. She became famous while a student at Yale Law School for writing Amazon's Antitrust Paradox [1], which has come to revolutionize the thinking on antitrust.

A recent example is asthma inhalers. An asthma inhaler in the US costs ~$500. In France it's $7. Now we can't just import from overseas. That's illegal (because reasons). So how are generic inhalers blocked? By tricks to extend patents. In this case, the patent holder justifies a patent extension with a small piece of plastic on the cap so you don't lose it.

That's all capitalism does: it builds enclosures, on this case on "intellectual" property and by buying the government to create a monopoly by banning imports and banning Medicare from negotiating prices.

Just the threat of FTC action and a Senate investigation has created concessions by (so far) 3 of the 4 inhaler makers agreeing to cap inhaler costs at $35. From $500. With just a threat.

Companies are so concerned about this that big donors to the Harris campaign want Lina Khan fired [2] (she is, of course, history in the event of a Trump victory in November).

This should be a lesson in both the necessity of regulation and how easy it can be if you halfway try. The idea that the government is bloated and ineffective is propaganda by those who want to poison the water supply to make a slightly higher profit.

Personally, I want the FTC to go after national ISPs.

And I fully support investigation and regulation of the Visa payment network.

[1]: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-06/kamala-ha...

You are confusing the DOJ (here) and the FTC (lina).

Lina in fact, has repeatedly lost in court and is widely viewed, by both antitrust hawks and doves alike, as being remarkably ineffective.

You'd be very hard pressed to compare her record to any effective FTC chair (IE in reigning things in) and say "yeah she's doing great"

Instead, she's showboated and lost repeatedly, which has only emboldened most companies who feel that she is so inept that they having nothing to fear.

In fact, she's lost so much she has been getting asked if she's doing it on purpose to try to get more power (lol):

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4490640-internal-ftc-ema...

Career FTC employess, who (despite what HN may think) are very very good lawyers and very good at antitrust law, have no faith in her "honesty and integrity":

"The annual OPM poll of federal employees shows morale and respect for the “honesty and integrity” of FTC leadership plunging from the highest level among federal agencies to the lowest levels under Khan."

That's not really a great sign. The biggest win they've had is basically "A settlement that blocked anticompetitive harms of pharma giant Amgen’s $28bn acquisition drug maker Horizon"

In the same time period, they lost 6 much more major cases in a row (microsoft/activision, etc). That's unheard of.

If you want someone who cares about the press, and will file lawsuits at the drop of a hat, take Lina. If you want someone who is actually going to achieve meaningful change, she ain't your person. I'd rather have an FTC that anyone is actually afraid of.

It's hilarious what a clown show it's been with Lina Khan at the top of the FTC. .

So the patent system and medical device regulations that prevent imports, two things specifically controlled by the government, create a situation which allows the maker to charge a ridiculous price.

I would rather they reformed patents for pharma and medical devices, and fought regulatory capture more than intervening more.

Small government types are often caricatured as being blindly pro business, but they realize that every new regulation is a chance for regulatory capture and help businesses to build a moat.

> With just a threat.

This is actually the ideal state of regulators. That they take action against a select few, which in turn 'scares' everyone else into complying with the law. Self regulation is much better than actual regulation.

> Self regulation is much better than actual regulation.

This not self-evident, and is very subjective.

Also, if regulator has to make san example of someone first before the rest fall into line, that is not self-regulation in my book, just plain regulation. Actual self-regulation ensures there are no triggers to activate governmental regulation.

> Self regulation is much better than actual regulation.

There's absolutely no evidence of this and plenty of evidence to the contrary.

A great example that springs to mind is the Grenfell Tower fire [1]. Grenfell Tower is a council block in England. These were historically housing for poorer people and were typically built cheaply and badly in the postwar era.

So what happened? Some cladding was improperly applied to the building. That allowed a fire to spread. Often these blocks only have one stairwell. They're concrete buildings so generally fires are contained to a single unit. As such, the safety advice is, in case of a fire, to stay in place. The cladding fire was different because the fire rapidly spread ato

At the time of the fire, the UK government was moving towards self-regulation by the UK building industry. The Grenfell Tower fire kinda ruined that plan.

Self-regulation is no regulation. Deregulation is no regulation. Corporate shields limit liability. By the time a problem is discovered, those responsible might be long gone or the proceeds of their negligence might be irrecoverable.

The only reason this idea exists is to increase profits because regulation hurts profits. That's literally it. It's a completely silly idea (like libertarianism).

A strong government is completely necessary to a well-functioning society.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

If it was up to the majority of companies out there, they'd "self-regulate" into forcing their workers to work 18 hour days for pennies while they dump toxic waste into the water supply to save an extra 7 cents YoY. It's a complete fantasy.

> That's all capitalism does: it builds enclosures, on this case on "intellectual" property and by buying the government to create a monopoly by banning imports and banning Medicare from negotiating prices.

Patents and import restrictions are orthogonal to capitalism as an economic system. They're obviously not the invisible hand of the market, but the actions of the very draconian hand of the government

That's ahistorical. The enclosure movement is seen by many as the origins of capitalism [1].

Private property is an enclosure. Intellectual property is an enclosure [2]. All of this is rent-seeking behaviour.

The story of Tetris is such a great example of all that capitalism actually does in practice: licensing and sub-licensing deals. The game was actually created by a few Russians. Everything else was just enclosures.

[1]: https://www.joewrote.com/p/the-origin-of-capitalism-the-encl...

[2]: https://www.marxist.com/intellectual-property-rights221105.h...

It sure is nice to have one's political opponents define words for oneself, hmm?

Private property sure, but intellectual property is not universal to all capitalist markets. And the protections vary and change. Even in American, often-times accused of strong IP protections, the protection is limited, as we're seeing here.

Lina hasn't revolutionized anything except the crazy number of stupid cases brought, which have been thrown out of court over and over again. Everyone wants her fired because she's a nuisance and out of her depth.

The government is ineffective, and companies can be policed but often the government chooses not to because it is corrupt, when it's not simply because they are incompetent. Often the smaller companies or ones who haven't bought enough politicians and bureaucrats are over-"policed" in order to benefit other companies.

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