Can a Libertarian society do without business regulations at all? I’m not sure it is possible or even desirable. Without some basic regulations I’m afraid there will be too many businesses that will try to make a quick buck at the expense of the guilliable folk. Things such pyramid schemes and other dubious financial schemes will be very common. Every business, especially one that is not interested in the creation of a long term positive image will attempt to push you products that might look cheap or attractive, but only later you will discover that you were conned. These deals won’t necessarily enter into the fraud category so in a Libertarian society they would be legal, but they would make a lot of people miserable.
Just something from the top of my head. A cellular company might offer a very cheap service, but then without your permission they will increase the price for this service.
Another thing. You buy your kid a cellular phone, and then you receive a bill of 1000$ because your kid bought something with the phone. Apparently the kid was able to purchase stuff from the site of the cellular operator just by using the phone.
Contracts are not infallible. So in the examples above and in many other examples you simply couldn’t predict what the company could legally do or not according to the contract. It might have been legal but it seriously hurt the consumers.
Business regulations are implemented directly by consumers in a free society.
I suppose this is after they’ve managed to con the bank/investors into paying for their idiocy…
Such an operation would fail very quickly. You don’t think there’s such a thing as consumer watchdog groups, even today? That they aren’t the bodies which have to bring corporate malfeasance to the attention of state oversight bodies in any case, in the rare instance there’s a half-way legitimate grievance and the whole thing isn’t political/anti-competition bs?
Instead of begging before the state, why not just post a bulletin which sensible consumers read? Think of it as your civic duty to research what you spend your money on, instead of pretending that “voting” will achieve anything. It takes five minutes to check a business entity’s cred online.
Did you read the contract? Did you research the cell provider for even thirty seconds before you chose it?
Contract? Research?
Standard-form contracts today are typically obtusely dense because enforceable contract interpretation is reserved to an inefficient and corrupt monopoly, so people know you won’t sue on contractual grounds unless it’s a really big deal. We would see what the free market would do to them. But even with today’s contracts, you can research for five minutes on Google to see if anyone has had problems with a given cell provider. If it’s anything which would cause consumers serious harm, someone will have moaned about it on Facebook or a forum somewhere.
Don’t you think it’s incumbent on people to take the slightest bit of responsibility for their own wellbeing, when it is easily within their individual power, and check around for just a few minutes before they make a non-trivial purchase from a supplier they haven’t dealt with before? Isn’t that what the internet is for?
These are how “business regulations” are implemented when the consumer is sovereign. It makes a lot more sense to me than delegating it to civil servants with no real accountability to anyone.
Additionally, one needs to step back for a moment and identify the new set of incentives that are created when a public regulating entity is created. A public regulating agency’s primary incentive is not to protect the consumer - it’s to protect its funding. Yes, its funding might be in jeopardy if bad products slip past its notice, but we’ve seen countless examples in the news about these events. At worst, the head of the agency gets the ax and life continues as normal. More commonly, public regulating agencies are inclined not to actually enforce their mandates simply because it will likely peeve off the major industries it oversees, which leads to furious Congressional lobbying, which then leads to trouble for the agency. As they say, !@#$ rolls down hill, and public regulatory agencies are at the bottom of the heap.
If regulation is as good as it’s made to be, de-violentize it. Publish a report on businesses assessing their safety/hygiene standards/whatever very quarter. Ask a fee four the audit. If the former-public regulator doesn’t go broke, than regulation is good. But as regulation is carried out now, even if it could be good, we’d have no way to know it.
What you are asking sounds very much like fraud, if someone is conned into what they buy, how is that not fraud ?
Dubious financial schemes are in fact very common, they are called fractional banking and government reserve banks. If people want to invest in pyramid schemes then they should be allowed to(unlike not having a choice about central reserve banks). If they are sold as solid financial instruments then that is clearly fraud, and does not need some regulator body other than a standard court case.
If a cellular company raises the price without your permission then it has violated and nullified the contract. Most libertarians would agree that changing a contract and then enforcing it on the party violates all libertarian principles.
If your kid bought something they should not have ? This has probably has happened to every parent in all of history, no regulator is going to fix that. Nor do libertarians want some regulator doing the job parents should be doing.
It wasn’t specifically forbidden in the contract for the cellular company to sell things just by using the phone number. Yet the parents could have anticipated that the cellular company will do this.
In contract is was specified that the prices may change, but what if the company decided to up the prices from 20$ to 20,000$? It is legal by the contract, but it is very nasty.
Not all companies are interested in the long run. There are restaurants for tourists in centers of cities for example that have no long-run incentives. There WILL be predator companies that won’t care much about their image. They will just seek ways to enrich themselves very quickly. They will spend lots of money and time to device contracts that will seem attractive to consumers, but in fact will work against them. Perhaps a missing clause there, small letters there, and people will sign things without being fully aware of the implications. On one hand this will not be fraud because the company will follow the contract, on the other hand it will be extremely nasty.
The company will be able to do nasty things because they were not explicitle forbidden in the contract, after all not everything could be anticipated. The company may also do nasty things that are allowed by the contract but the consumer could not have anticipated how he might lose if the company did those things.
Contracts are not infallible, and not everything could be anticipated or written in the contract. Some things in a contract have implications that the costumer will not be able to foresee, and so forth.
Also, how do I quote things that others have said here, can you please help me with this?
Then why not de-violentize fraud? We can have companies that check for reliabiliy of other people, yet most of us do think that the law should deal with this and not private enterprenours.
True, not all companies under these hypothetical scenarios will be interested in the long run. In fact, there are many that exist today that have the same attitude. There are and will always be snake oil salesmen. The question is not whether or not they exist, but how to protect against them. Any company that is sufficiently large enough to offer you such services as cell phones or any contractual service will have to have spent a considerable amount of time and energy acquiring a strong reputation. If you sign up for a 2-year contract from some shady new business around the corner without doing your research, you’re asking for trouble.
I also don’t see government regs as the solution - either you’d need a regulator in every shop and business, or you’d need such a draconian system of licensing that it would destroy the whole sector. Assuming that economic decisions boil down to voluntary exchange by individuals, does that not mean that the thrifty and vigilant individual is the best line of defense?
And as for the whole quotation thing - what I’ve done is copy/pasting parts of the quotable passage and then hitting the " (quotation) icon within the toolbar above the text box in which you write for those passages.
Do you know what the phrase “caveat emptor” means? Why should we be forced to pay for others’ gullibility?
They will? It must be nice to be a clairvoyant.
Putting it another way, can you prove that they necessarily will be very common?
Can you give me your definition for “conned” please?
Can you give me your definition for “miserable” please?
I’d imagine libertarian courts would hold that a company can’t unilaterally raise the price on a contracted service unless it reserves the right to do so in the contract.
You can try to return the stuff that your kid bought with the phone. Otherwise, caveat emptor.
Personally, I think business regulations would emerge as a result of “case law” – that is, based on judgements rendered by courts. However, I don’t think they’d be nearly as expansive and invasive as they are today.
What do you mean by “de-violentize fraud”? So what if “most of us” think that “the law” should check for people’s reliability instead of private entrepreneurs?
Also, to quote people, use the following (without spaces inside the angle brackets): [ quote ]blah blah blah[ / quote ]
You can also set who you’re quoting with this (inside the initial quote tag with a space after “quote”): user=“Autolykos”
One of the unintended consequences of government regulation of businesses is that it actually makes it easier for the “bad guys” to harm people. Individuals give up their responsibility to make sure they are dealing with a reputable business. The government seal of approval is often bought and paid for. The regulator becomes overcome by the influence of the regulatee. In the end, these schemes are often used by a few companies to gain an unfair advantage over their competitors. You’ll find far too frequent examples where one to a few companies actually author the regulation with the express purpose of seizing an advantage. This distorts a free market and cannot be permitted in a free society.
Private, voluntary arrangements are superior to the government version, but I believe even these have their limitations. At least they are voluntary.
The ultimate responsibility falls upon the individual. In addition, when individuals take this to heart, it becomes much more difficult for bad businessmen to cheat them. While they may get away with it the first time, the bad actors go out of business.
I think that what I was looking for. There will be definitely be regulations even in a Libertarian society, only that they will be maintained and executed by the judicial system and not by the legislative system.
I can tell you from the perspective of a business owner (I built a .COM business with a few partners) that it’s not in our best interest to engage in such activities. If we want to retain our user base we need to continually innovate and provide value to the customer. Most of our energies are diverted to providing the most value to the user.. why? Because that is how we have been able to get ahead of our competition and make more profit! Our other biggest challenge was finding the right price-point for our customers. Raising our prices by only $1 is a scary thought and we do so very nervously! If we raise it too high too fast we will lose a ton of money and customers. We also have to make sure we are keeping up with the value-added benefits our competitors are providing their customers, if we don’t evolve and improve then they will take our market share and we will lose money. Since they are a business too and doing the same thing as we are (with a twist) they also need to provide more value-added benefits to the customer, since we we need to keep up with them we have to make sure to stay ahead of them too by providing even more value. Since we also don’t want to lose customers to our competitors if there is a dispute or someone is unhappy with our service we usually compensate them for their troubles even if it’s at a loss to us, we can’t let our competitors gain ground!
You’re saying on top of all of that we STILL NEED regulations? dizzy face
Now I don’t want to generalize my case and apply it to all businesses and say this is how it works for all of them but most businesses that have an interest in staying alive for the long run need to worry about these things. One exception to this rule is, of course, businesses with political (state) connections/funding, they don’t have to adhere to all these practices, so long as their political sponsors are happy they can stay afloat.
Then why not de-violentize fraud? We can have companies that check for reliabiliy of other people, yet most of us do think that the law should deal with this and not private enterprenours.
Actually I known of no market where fraud has been specifically punished in the restitutional sense. People just stop doing business. So, fraud to could be, and probably will be de-violentized.
Also, limited liability is partially de-violentized fraud. It is not hard to see how that concept could be extended to a full fraud-fault-free system.
In the end, it all comes down to what would, or would not, fly in a market of competing legal services. I just don’t think forcing regulation of guys would fly. Out own ethical considerations, the Nap first of all, will prove unimportant: profit tests are all that really matter. And, of course, we won’t know until we see it in action.
