Comment by mapt
5 months ago
In a market-first values system, where we rely on the labor market to largely self-regulate given the promises that free market idealogues & corporate actors made us, colluding on wages like this should lead to scorched-earth retribution from the FTC.
Not "Oh hey there, you're not allowed to do that, stop that", but "We are diluting your stock by a quarter and distributing it to your workers" type shit.
> given the promises that free market idealogues & corporate actors made us
I find it amusing/annoying how many Free™-market boosterism messages are actually contradictory "heads I win, tails you lose" constructs. For example:
1. "Regulations are bad, because left to its own devices the market will be optimally-efficient, once everyone has perfect-information about all the prices and deals other people are making."
2. "Regulations are bad, because cartels and collusion will be destroyed by defectors who use their freedom to make secret prices and hidden deals."
Sometimes these arguments come from the same people, but even when they don't they represent two wildly incompatible ideas of what "the free market" really is.
I wonder what the name is for the fallacies committed by this comment and grandparent comment. It's this disingenuous "even though nobody in this thread has expressed these two contradictory things, I'm just going to make them up and pretend that an imaginary member of [group that I don't like] said them".
It's like a strawman fallacy did a fusion dance with an ad-hominem. I see it all the time on HN - surely it has a name.
> It's this disingenuous "even though nobody in this thread has expressed [...]"
No, what's disingenuous is your weird attempt to stifle an entirely on-topic discussion which has made you uncomfortable. You're suggesting that we may not criticize a stance or argument unless another Hacker News user has directly advocated for it. That's not how it works, or else we'd never be able to talk about things like the DMCA or Microsoft's forced-reboot update policy.
That said, how about we steer away from pure-meta personal attack posts to something that at least involves the original topic of markets and market-actors, starting with:
> I'm just going to make them up and pretend that an imaginary member of [group that I don't like] said them"
Your comment is saying--via sarcastic subtext--that I have "made up" items #1 and #2 and that (to substitute GP's term) "free-market ideologues" do not advance either argument about efficiency or cartel-risk.
Is that really what you believe and you'd be convinced otherwise by examples, or would you like to issue some non-sarcastic clarification?
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