Personally, I find regulations to be a bandaid over a legitimate problem: shareholder misalignment. Really, companies should only ever be consumer and worker coöps since those are the direct stakeholders and the reason businesses exist in the first place. Shareholders aren’t needed and only serve as a form of parasitic wealth extraction that feeds capital accural, cartel formation, and monopolization.
But you’re missing externalities. A huge reason we need better regulation is the tendency of corporations to externalize their costs to all of our detriment.
Climate and pollutions issues are a prime example. In a free market A corporations saves money by evading cleanup costs, polluting, and the rest of us pay. A justly regulated market minimizes those externalities so the corporations covers all its costs
Any work I do on my house I do to code (and I do look it up when starting a new project). The previous owner… not so much - I found newspaper wrapped around electrical junction boxes, because wires never get hot enough to light old, super dry newspaper on fire…
Personally, I find regulations to be a bandaid over a legitimate problem: shareholder misalignment. Really, companies should only ever be consumer and worker coöps since those are the direct stakeholders and the reason businesses exist in the first place. Shareholders aren’t needed and only serve as a form of parasitic wealth extraction that feeds capital accural, cartel formation, and monopolization.
But you’re missing externalities. A huge reason we need better regulation is the tendency of corporations to externalize their costs to all of our detriment.
Climate and pollutions issues are a prime example. In a free market A corporations saves money by evading cleanup costs, polluting, and the rest of us pay. A justly regulated market minimizes those externalities so the corporations covers all its costs
Even a perfect utopian co-op needs regulations beacuse most people don’t know anything about environmental impact or proper safety precautions.
Any work I do on my house I do to code (and I do look it up when starting a new project). The previous owner… not so much - I found newspaper wrapped around electrical junction boxes, because wires never get hot enough to light old, super dry newspaper on fire…