On the contrary, ensuring fair trading practices is precisely the area where government needs to be most actively involved in economic matters. What is the downside of clamping down on borderline fraud, exactly?
What do you mean "fair"? To me the idea of free/consensual exchange (backed by court-mediated disputes and bankruptcy protection) most resembles "fair". If you like a service, use it. If you don't, don't. The (quite small) risk of falling through the cracks and ending up hard stuck is just something one risk-accepts when signing up to a service and maintaining important data there.
Your risk management is entirely your own concern. I would never want a paternalistic government dictating when and how I interact with the market. Why do you want to impose it on me?
Their main point was about software purchases, where consensual exchange needs the ability to refund when it doesn't work. It's good to impose refunds.
> The (quite small) risk of falling through the cracks and ending up hard stuck is just something one risk-accepts when signing up to a service and maintaining important data there.
Why should it be? Fuck that!
> I would never want a paternalistic government dictating when and how I interact with the market. Why do you want to impose it on me?
The government wouldn't dictate your actions at all here.
It's just part of doing business. Know who you're transacting with, pay attention to the specifics of your agreement, and do your due diligence. This is very basic stuff. If you have a dispute, then it gets resolved in court. That's literally what courts are for. If our courts can't keep with demand, we should fix that problem.
> The government wouldn't dictate your actions at all here.
They are, they're saying that the companies I transact with must have customer service/refund/consumer protection level above x. I'd like to choose my own risk level when transacting with others. If I want a (presumably cheaper) deal with a fly-by-night, high-risk, vendor why should anyone else have the right to stop me? It's my risk to take.
It's the same argument as with credit. If I want to borrow money at an "usurious" rate (presumably because no one else will lend to me), why should anyone else stop me? It's my risk to take and my bankruptcy on the line.
> It's just part of doing business. Know who you're transacting with, pay attention to the specifics of your agreement, and do your due diligence.
Most industries don't have the pattern of blocking people on a whim. It should not be a part of doing business just because big tech companies find it easier. And due diligence doesn't work for proprietary social media. There are no proper alternatives because they don't interoperate.
To put that first point another way, lack of capricious banning and similar has been a business norm until now and hasn't been a legal issue, but if companies with millions of customers are going to cause problems then we should collectively bargain their ability to access those millions of customers against those basic standards.
> That's literally what courts are for. If our courts can't keep with demand, we should fix that problem.
There is a huge amount of friction to go to court. I sure don't want every business in the world to be encouraged to ride the edge of "barely not worth suing".
Solving that friction is not feasible.
> It's my risk to take.
It's hard to measure that risk, and if everyone has to spend lots of time taking care of due diligence for every purchase then that's pure waste that hurts everyone. Purely free markets depend on everyone having sufficient information and that doesn't fit the real world.
And if the fly by night vendor makes a lot of sales by being 1% cheaper, from people that didn't intentionally accept the risk, they take market share and it's harder to find a competent vendor.
having worked in the IRS, they could easily be a lot more efficient if they weren't unionized. the IRS is easily by far the most mismanaged organization i've ever had the displeasure of working at
Both things can be true. Back in the days when I respected their perspective, many US "small government" advocates advanced arguments about efficiency, and some of them made well-intentioned attempts to implement procedural and administrative reforms. No longer! Their agenda has long since devolved towards deliberate sabotage.
That said, I'm also suspicious of public employee unions. Unions, in general, are a necessary counterweight to capital - but that incentive structure doesn't exist within the public sector. The best argument one might advance is that a public-employee union can resist sabotage (as above) of their department's work, but that's poor governmental practice (I would, quite frankly, prefer that those impairing administrative function have the consequences of their actions quickly discovered), and not what usually seems to happen in the real world.
