> If you don't have laws against dumping in the commons, yes people will dump.
You can’t possibly say, in good faith, that it think this was legal, can you? Of course it wasn’t. It was totally legal discharging some of the less odious things into the river despite going through a residential neighborhood about 500 feet downstream— the EPA permitted that and while they far exceeded their allotted amounts, that was far less of a crime. Though it was funny to see one kid in my class who lived in that neighborhood right next to the factory ask a scientist they sent to give a presentation in our second grade class why the snow in their back yard was purple near the pond (one thing they made was synthetic clothing dye.) People used to lament runaway dogs returning home rainbow colored. That was totally legal. However, this huge international chemical conglomerate with a huge US presence routinely, secretively, and consistently broke the law dumping carcinogenic, toxic, and ecologically disastrous chemicals there, and three other locations, in the middle of the night. Sometimes when we played there, any of the stuff we left lying around was moved to the edges and there were fresh bulldozer tracks in the morning, and we just thought it was from farm equipment. All of it was in residential neighborhoods without so much as a no trespassing sign posted, let alone a chain link fence, for decades, until the 90s, because they were trimming their bill for the legal and readily available disposal services they primarily used, and of course signs and chainlink fences would have raised questions. They correctly gauged that they could trade our health for their profit: the penalties and superfund project cost were a tiny pittance of what that factory made them in that time. Our incident was so common it didn’t make the news, unlike in Holbrook, MA where a chemical company ignored the neighborhood kids constantly playing in old metal drums in a field near the factory which contained things like hexavelant chromium, to expected results. The company’s penalty? Well they have to fund the cleanup. All the kids and moms that died? Well… boy look at the great products that chemical factory made possible! Speaking of which:
> Just look back over the last 200 years, per…
Irrelevant “I heart capitalism” screed that doesn’t refute a single thing I said. You can’t ignore bad things people, institutions, and societies do because they weren’t bad to everybody. The Catholic priests that serially molested children probably each had a dossier of kind, generous, and selfless ways they benefited their community. The church that protected and enabled them does an incredible amount of humanitarian work around the world. Doesn’t matter.
> Masks
Come on now. Those businesses leaders had balls but none of them were crystal. What someone said in 2023 has no bearing on what businesses did in 2020 based on the best available science and their motivations for doing it. Just like you can’t call businesses unethical for exposing their workers to friable asbestos when medicine generally thought it was safe, you can’t call businesses ethical for refusing to let their workers protect themselves— on their own dime, no less— when medicine largely considered it unsafe.
Your responses to those two things in that gigantic pile of corporate malfeasance don’t really challenge anything I said.
>You can’t possibly say, in good faith, that it think this was legal, can you? Of course it wasn’t. It was totally legal discharging some of the less odious things into the river despite going through a residential neighborhood about 500 feet downstream
That is exactly my point. Nobody would dispute that bad things would happen if you don't have laws against dumping pollution in the commons and enforce those laws.
>Doesn’t matter.
It does matter when we're trying to compare the overall effect of various economic systems. Like the anti-capitalist one versus the capitalist one.
>What someone said in 2023 has no bearing on what businesses did in 2020 based on the best available science and their motivations for doing it.
Well that's an entirely different argument than you were making earlier. There was no evidence that masks outside of a hospital setting were a critical health necessity in 2021 and the intuition against allowing them for customer-facing employees proved sound in 2023 when comprehensive studies showed no health benefit from wearing them.
Ok, so you’re saying that because bad things would happen anyway then it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal? So you’re just going to ignore how much worse it would be if there were just no laws at all? Corporate scumbags will push any system to its limit and beyond, and if you change the limit, they’ll change the push. Just look at the milk industry in New York City before food adulteration laws took effect. The “bad things will happen anyway” argument makes total sense if you ignore magnitude. Which you can’t.
> anti capitalist
If you think pointing out the likelihood of corporate misbehavior is anti-capitalist, you’re getting your subjects confused.
I'm saying that under any political ideology or philosophy, those things would be illegal and effectively enforced. So this is not a failing of any particular ideology, this is just a human failing showing how it's difficult to enforce complex laws in a complex world.
I think what you're promoting is anti-capitalism, meaning believing that imposing heavy restrictions beyond simply laws against dumping on the commons is going to make us better off, when it totally discounts the enormous positive effect that private enterprise has on society and the incredible harm that can be done through crude attempts to regiment human behavior and the corruption that it can breed in the government bureaucracy.
See, "everything I want to do is illegal" for the flip side of this, where attempts to stop private sector abuse lead to tyranny:
You can’t possibly say, in good faith, that it think this was legal, can you? Of course it wasn’t. It was totally legal discharging some of the less odious things into the river despite going through a residential neighborhood about 500 feet downstream— the EPA permitted that and while they far exceeded their allotted amounts, that was far less of a crime. Though it was funny to see one kid in my class who lived in that neighborhood right next to the factory ask a scientist they sent to give a presentation in our second grade class why the snow in their back yard was purple near the pond (one thing they made was synthetic clothing dye.) People used to lament runaway dogs returning home rainbow colored. That was totally legal. However, this huge international chemical conglomerate with a huge US presence routinely, secretively, and consistently broke the law dumping carcinogenic, toxic, and ecologically disastrous chemicals there, and three other locations, in the middle of the night. Sometimes when we played there, any of the stuff we left lying around was moved to the edges and there were fresh bulldozer tracks in the morning, and we just thought it was from farm equipment. All of it was in residential neighborhoods without so much as a no trespassing sign posted, let alone a chain link fence, for decades, until the 90s, because they were trimming their bill for the legal and readily available disposal services they primarily used, and of course signs and chainlink fences would have raised questions. They correctly gauged that they could trade our health for their profit: the penalties and superfund project cost were a tiny pittance of what that factory made them in that time. Our incident was so common it didn’t make the news, unlike in Holbrook, MA where a chemical company ignored the neighborhood kids constantly playing in old metal drums in a field near the factory which contained things like hexavelant chromium, to expected results. The company’s penalty? Well they have to fund the cleanup. All the kids and moms that died? Well… boy look at the great products that chemical factory made possible! Speaking of which:
> Just look back over the last 200 years, per…
Irrelevant “I heart capitalism” screed that doesn’t refute a single thing I said. You can’t ignore bad things people, institutions, and societies do because they weren’t bad to everybody. The Catholic priests that serially molested children probably each had a dossier of kind, generous, and selfless ways they benefited their community. The church that protected and enabled them does an incredible amount of humanitarian work around the world. Doesn’t matter.
> Masks
Come on now. Those businesses leaders had balls but none of them were crystal. What someone said in 2023 has no bearing on what businesses did in 2020 based on the best available science and their motivations for doing it. Just like you can’t call businesses unethical for exposing their workers to friable asbestos when medicine generally thought it was safe, you can’t call businesses ethical for refusing to let their workers protect themselves— on their own dime, no less— when medicine largely considered it unsafe.
Your responses to those two things in that gigantic pile of corporate malfeasance don’t really challenge anything I said.