Comment by lemming | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lemming | Hacker News Reader

Here's another interesting tidbit about plain packaging: the Australian government has been sued by big tobacco over this, under the terms of a trade agreement similar to the TPPA that is currently being negotiated in secret. These agreements allow large multinationals to sue governments who are party to them if they feel that legislation enacted by that government unfairly prejudices their business. The tobacco companies couldn't sue under the terms of the US-Aus trade agreement so Phillip Morris rearranged their affairs so they appeared as a Hong Kong company and then sued under the terms of that agreement instead.

I live in New Zealand, which will unfortunately almost certainly be party to the TPPA before long. This will affect our ability to introduce plain cigarette packaging, resist meddling in our copyright laws and to continue using generic drugs to lower the cost of healthcare for all New Zealanders.

The only small glimmer of common sense in all this is that the Australian High Court ruled against the tobacco companies. But we'll inevitably end up spending a large amount of our tax dollars on expensive legal battles with companies whose revenue approaches our GDP if we implement legislation that favours our citizens over international big business. It's a travesty.

Would you prefer it any other way? Instead of going to the High Court your government can just say "what we say goes, and if you happened to be in business X that we no longer like, you're out of luck", I'd rather see them fight in courts. A dying business fighting tooth and nail for their survival is understandable and expected whatever poison they happen to be selling.

Of course I'd prefer it another way. Whether you like it or not, businesses are subject to all sorts of regulations from governments. Maybe you're a believer in the free market; I'm not. I'd like businesses that make their living exploiting people to be regulated.

Of course, but those regulations come from somewhere, they come from court cases, from subject matter experts' testimonials, from balanced review of views and facts on both sides. We don't want a random politician with questionable morals and unknown contributors banning products or whole sectors of the market bypassing courts and due process.

To be fair, restrictions on tobacco products are well supported by the majority of, at the very least non-smokers, voters in most Western countries. You don't see massive demonstrations or petitions to reinstate the right to smoke in office, restaurant, public place, etc. In some case, it might be more dubious, but for tobacco consumption I think the trend is pretty clear.

Anecdotally, many smokers also support continued regulations on tobacco products. Tobacco companies have very little sympathy in the zeitgeist.

Court cases are ultimately decided based on the law which, as you know, is created and enacted on via a parliament or congress of elected politicians. Yes, even case law. Unless you think that a court can rule outside the law?

It might depends if you live in common law or civil law country. In the former case, you could say that sometimes a judge could create a law. Less so in the latter case. GP is very likely coming from the common law perspective.

Actually, having the government having the power to dismantle the kind of businesses they don't like is actually a neat idea.

I know our representative governments aren't democratic (despite elections and stuff). But big capitalist corporations are even worse. So, before we get rid of governments and their ludicrously concentrated power, why don't we look at the elephant in the room first: corporations and their even more ludicrously concentrated power?

> A dying business fighting tooth and nail for their survival is understandable and expected whatever poison they happen to be selling.

This analogy (fighting for survival) doesn't really hold: corporations aren't persons. We don't care about corporations, we care about the people affected by them (both inside and outside). A corporation fighting for survival doesn't have the same moral right as a person fighting for survival, despite most laws treating them as "moral persons". Human death is horrible. The end of a business, frankly, is no big deal. (What is a big deal is the subsequent unemployment —but that can be mitigated.)

> So, before we get rid of governments and their ludicrously concentrated power, why don't we look at the elephant in the room first: corporations and their even more ludicrously concentrated power?

Hey, Marx is back !

Instead of looking at the wrong elephant, i.e. the one actually selling products that people want, I'd say you better attack the one that's 1) taxing you to death for subpar services 2) force-feeding their education to your kids (brainwashing) 3) getting away with mismanagement of public resources (politician immunity) 4) able to resort to violent actions should you not respect them (take your possessions, imprison you, or worse). 5) can make you go to war and die. For free.

Yeah, sure, Corporations are SUPER Evil. Except that they are actually composed of normal people like you and me, while the people in power in Governments are certainly from a far more selected class that you can never hope to reach. But believe what you want.

actually selling products that people want

Selling products a minority of people want, products that the vast majority do not want their children consuming or seeing as glamourous in any way.

The fact that some people want a product does not create a moral right to that product, and does not mean it is wrong for a government to enforce laws restricting and prohibiting those products.

Selling products a minority of people want

Actually, even in that minority, they only want the product because of the addictive substance nicotine. Most of the minority want to quit using the product, but find it very hard to do so. The rest just have a death wish :-)

> The fact that some people want a product does not create a moral right to that product,

Where is the moral right coming from ? That's purely philosophical and I certainly do not want the government (which is no more no less than the dictature of the majority) to tell me what's right or wrong when it comes to what I consume.

And if you don't want your children to buy cigarettes, don't give them money, or better, educate them. It works quite well, but I guess in your reasoning you expect the education to come from the government instead of the parents?

> And if you don't want your children to buy cigarettes, don't give them money, or better, educate them. It works quite well, but I guess in your reasoning you expect the education to come from the government instead of the parents?

No, it doesn't work at all well.

Tobacco companies target cigarettes at children. Strict laws, with expensive enforcement, are needed to stop people selling cigarettes to children.

> Tobacco companies target cigarettes at children. Strict laws, with expensive enforcement, are needed to stop people selling cigarettes to children.

Never seen any tobacco ad with children smoking. There are already strict laws regarding the sales and distribution of cigarettes. Honestly, all this "finally the government is doing something" is just massive hypocrisy, because governments have been living on increasing Tobacco taxes for decades. So it's all too convenient to paint the corporations like the Big Bad Wolf when the official distribution of cigarettes was never a free market to start with.

> Never seen any tobacco ad with children smoking.

It's more subtle than that. Most of the marketing is underhanded. You can see it in movies. When did you last see a film depicting a negative aspect of smoking? Cancer, bad smell, addiction… I personally can only recall one, maybe two instances. Most of the time, smoking is the reward after some heroic action, a sign of manliness, a classy move, a cool "rebel attitude", or just no big deal.

The studies about that are terrifying. Those films have the power to multiply the likelihood of a kid becoming a smoker by at least three. And I'm talking about kids who already have a smoker's environment (parents, friends…). For those who don't live in an otherwise smoking environment, the multiplier is ten. (Presumably, the initial risk was much lower in the first place.)

So, you don't want your kid to smoke? Turn off the TV, or have strict control over what your kid watches. Don't smoke yourself, and don't let people smoke in front of your kid. You've got to admit, past some point, it's just too much effort. Past some point, collective action is required. I think one of the first steps is to recognise that tobacco is an addictive drug. That, like any other recreational drug, it should be used with extreme care.

You've never seen a Joe Camel cartoon? I refer you to the following study: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=393811

"The children demonstrated high rates of logo recognition. When analyzed by product category, the level of recognition of cigarette logos was intermediate between children's and adult products. The recognition rates of The Disney Channel logo and Old Joe (the cartoon character promoting Camel cigarettes) were highest in their respective product categories. Recognition rates increased with age. Approximately 30% of 3-year-old children correctly matched Old Joe with a picture of a cigarette compared with 91.3% of 6-year-old children."

the top 1% of larger corporations (i.e. VP level and CxO level) is more selective (i.e. not composed of normal people like you and me) than governments.

For both country governments and the governments of corporations, having some amount of both democratic control (through elections, or through laws that say what corporations can and cannot do - we don't want corporations to poison our kids any more than governments) as well as some economic responsibility (which is difficult - both for CEOs and for government officials it is frighteningly easy to disguise bad performance as "properties of the global economy").

taxing you to death for subpar services? Hello, Comcast and AT&T!

brainwashing your kids? Disney or Activision would never do that!

violent action? Corporations only do that in places with weak governments, which is a good thing. Never mind that the US health care system means that firing people also means taking their health care away.

can put you into deadly situations? Well, corporations would never do that. No one died in Dow Chemical's (now Monsanto) huge chemical spill in Bhopal. Also, both corporations and governments get rather bad PR when they kill people.

I like how you answer without making any sense.

> taxing you to death for subpar services? Hello, Comcast and AT&T!

you don't have to use their services. Hello, competition ? Well, if you don't have competition where you live, too bad, but then that's probably because of excessive regulation. But if you are in a free country, at least you are free to move around. That's not given in countries with STRONG governments -blink-. Ask North Koreans or even Chinese what they think.

> brainwashing your kids? Disney or Activision would never do that!

You can perfectly live without watching Disney movies or playing Activision games. Living without going to school ? Good luck with that until a gov official knocks on your door.

> can put you into deadly situations? Well, corporations would never do that. No one died in Dow Chemical's (now Monsanto) huge chemical spill in Bhopal. Also, both corporations and governments get rather bad PR when they kill people.

yeah, I'm sure corporations have millions of people's bloods on their hands. World War I ? States. World War II? States. And it's certainly not corporations who killed the dozens of Russians in the Gulags or who killed massively the Chinese during the "Cultural revolution".

Seriously, go grab a book to educate yourself.

> you don't have to use [comcast and AT&T] services. Hello, competition ?

Bwahahah, that's a good one. Competition in a natural local monopoly setting, are you kidding me? Network infrastructure, especially the last mile, is expensive. Plus, it doesn't make economic sense to duplicate it. What naturally happens in a "free" market, is, some corporation put the first lines, capture almost everyone (because let's be honest, they will have a phone and an internet connection), and have a nifty monopoly. They sometimes lease their lines, but often at higher prices than what they would charge the end customer (it actually happens in France). And don't you try to build a redundant line for yourself: you won't capture half the customers after you do that, switching is just such a hassle.

If you want competition at the last mile, the physical infrastructure must be owned by the state, or the local community. Which will then lease the lines at a reasonable prices without bulk prices that favours the big over the small. Then you will have the condition for a free and efficient market.

Competition is good, but you have to ensure its presence. Free markets are mostly good but you sometimes have to enforce that freedom. (No, that's not an oxymoron. See how static typing sometimes allow you do do things you couldn't reasonably do with dynamic typing.)

> You can perfectly live without watching Disney movies or playing Activision games. Living without going to school ? Good luck with that until a gov official knocks on your door.

I have heard of studies showing that a sizeable proportion of kids spend more time in front of the TV than in front of their professor. Couple that with the fact TV is designed to catch your attention without any effort on your part, and I'm not sure which is actually doing most of the brainwashing.

> the top 1% of larger corporations (i.e. VP level and CxO level) is more selective (i.e. not composed of normal people like you and me) than governments.

1% is one thing and I don't even know if you have any source to back this claim anyway. But look at 50% of the government official vs 50% of company executives, you'll find the companies are way more "democratic" than the officials.

Depends what you call "company". A 10 person business doesn't concentrate that much power, even if the CEO is a mean psychopathic dictator: that's only 9 employee under his command.

But if you look at big companies (let's say bigger than the equivalent of 1000 full time employees), this is a whole 'nother business.

I don't have the answer either way, but it could be interesting to see where most people are employed. Which masters yield the most labour? States? Companies? Big corporations?

Anyway, how did you came to the conclusion that companies are more democratic than official governments? Most are command economies inside! And while they don't have the legal power to kill you, they do have the power to banish you, and do so much more often than governments do.

Yes. I would like the laws I live under to be debated and enacted under a transparent democratic process, not a process that makes major changes to the society I live in via a series of secret negotiations and deals made by faceless and unaccountable men and women who weren't democratically elected.

Does that answer your question?

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