alt Hacker News> why market participants are being given special treatment here. There are laws, and they must be followed.
Laws are contextual, they depend on more fundamental principles. A regulation that says "you must use this specific screw size" isn't a law in the same sense as "you shall not murder." When a "law" violates the principle of non-initiation of force, when it tells a manufacturer how to exercise his property rights under threat of imprisonment, it's not really a law but edict.
The issue is who decides and when. A court decides after harm occurs, based on evidence of actual negligence or fraud. A regulatory agency decides before anyone does anything, based on hypothetical risks, and compels compliance under threat of force.
> Which problem is personal and which isn't?
A personal problem is one that doesn't involve the infringement of rights against another person. Most problems are personal. One's homelessness doesn't give one a right to another's property. The moment you say "your need obligates me," you've crossed the line into compulsion.
> in your worldview, there is no morality at all. . . . People like you behave toward the state like moody teenagers toward their parents.
That tells me enough about the depth of your study on this subject. Morality is a science of identifying the principles by which a rational being sustains his life. You're not discussing that science, you're reaching for a metaphor.
> But I read what you write and interpret it.
"Cognitive dissonance" is an accusation about the state of my mind, not an interpretation. You don't get to call me internally contradictory and then say "I'm just interpreting."
Yeah, that guy got unnecessarily personal. Let me try.
You're right that civil judgements (and, though you haven't mentioned it yet, reputational brand damage through public exposure) are important checks on harm, but they break down in particular circumstances. In the first place, they're not a fair fight: corporations are able to limit, or even prevent, access to the court system by forced arbitration, jurisdiction changes, or intentionally running up attorney fees beyond what any plaintiffs can afford to risk. They also have ($£€¥, again) larger megaphones than any individual can reliably command.
The toy example of glass in a soup can makes for a perfect case, but civil suits are impossible to pursue where harms are long-term, diffuse, cumulative, or simply too difficult for a jury of lay-people to understand. For instance, we all know that lead is harmful, but when multiple sources of lead exist it's impossible to prove (to the standard correctly required by the courts) that this company's lead caused your particular illness. It's similarly impossible to prove that any particular cancer-causing agent caused any particular cancer, even when we know statistically that it has raised the cancer risk profile of millions of people, and therefore been a causative factor in many deaths.
If we insist that the only mechanism for redress be individual companies held to account in individual cases, we either give up on the idea that corporate behavior can be aligned with the public interest, or (worse?) we make sure that politically-disfavored companies will be scapegoated by the media or the courts, while better-connected players get away with anything at all.
Please allow me to forestall one possible counter-argument: if you, as my Libertarian-ish relatives do, reject outright the idea of "public interest", then we won't have much to say to each other: our world-views are simply too different. Otherwise, I'm interested in what you have to say.