Comment by chillingeffect
8 years ago
You make a good point about the government, but I don't agree it extends to corporations. Corporations do much of the dirty work of the government.
Defense contractors and mining concerns operate hand-in-hand with the government, training police, researching weapons, running prisons, crunching data. Look at the story of this article: it's corporations doing the dirty work the government isn't technically allowed to do.
Furthermore corporations only submit to greatly reduced requirements for attending to those with special needs, like in wheelchairs, deaf, etc. There are some valuable services provided to them, like closed captioning, but only under passioned support from idealists and with profit incentive.
If we left it all to corporations, only the most able-bodied and well-off people would run the country for the most able-bodied and well-off, forming tight-knit circles to maintain their power and never perceiving the world as a place for living, only protecting power.
> ...There are some valuable services provided to them, like closed captioning, but only under passioned support from idealists and with profit incentive.
It's worth noting that video closed captioning had to be mandated by law (Telecommunications Act of 1996) before it became universal[1]. Some broadcasters were ahead of the curve & implemented it prior to the legislation, but it was rarely comprehensive.
Of course, this just underscores your point that disabled consumers were not a large enough group to have their needs met by market forces alone.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/telecommunications-act-1996-and-...