Comment by derefr

> More competition can't lead to nastier alternatives

Pre-FDA "patent medicines" beg to differ. Austria's wine industry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_diethylene_glycol_wine_sc...) begs to differ. Those were competitive markets! And they certainly increasingly optimized for something as competition increased. What they increasingly optimized for, though, was the naive experience that made people buy the product (e.g. taste; "feeling good"), at the expense of health/welfare outcomes. It turns out that some poisons taste good, and make your product more popular!

Over the long term, statistically, yes, companies that do bad things in the name of profitability probably get boycotted and die.

In the medium term, though, the people that bought the products die as well. That's a necessary step in that long-term equilibrium. The "state of nature" of a capitalist market is one where companies cut corners until the corners kill people, and then people get mad and get together to kill those particular companies.

This is a dynamic equilibrium though. It's not that you end up with corporations afraid to cut corners. You end up with a constant stream of new corporations forming, going well for a while, cutting corners, killing people, and then being taken apart. It's the reverse of P.T. Barnum's "a sucker is born every minute": an unethical entrepreneur is born every minute, to take advantage of those suckers. On average, the set of corporations in existence at any given moment would be half "one step away from killing people", and half "already killing people but nobody's noticed yet."

And indeed, this is how things were for much of the Victorian era (with cyanide-based paints, nitrocelluloid plastics, and other such already-well-known hazards continuing to be sold on the open market) up through to the 1950s.

Being humans rather than animals, we have the unique capability (if not often the motivation) to learn an object lesson without having to personally suffer its negative consequences even once. We can see someone else burn their hands on a stove, and then make a rule about not touching stoves, such that nobody ever has to actually burn their hand on a stove to personally re-derive that rule again.