[aantix]

Whatever rules in life get laid out, whether it's scoring soccer goals or everyone gets X amount of food per month, someone always becomes good at "optimizing" those rules.

We are humans born with different abilities with different tastes and strive for different things. Equalizing the outcomes of all by artificially holding some back suppresses the very creative life force in each one of us, ends in misery and progress is hampered.

[pintxo]

Talking about the extremes, I agree.

Talking about defining sensible rules to allow a wider range of people to be successful than only those being a member of the local Golf Club, I disagree.

There should be no question that we need rules, and at the same time there should be intense discussions - if not intellectual fights - about which rules we need and how to implement and enforce them.

[aantix]

>allow a wider range of people to be successful

But what does "successful" mean in practice?

E.g. If there are 100 software security companies, 50% of those are below average in performance (and will probably get chosen less).

Do we no longer choose let the consumers choose? All of these software companies should now receive a percentage of business, regardless of performance/trust/expertise?

Or should the top performing companies be disallowed the following year to market or do sales in order to give the underperforming companies a chance to catch up?

What is "sensible" and who decides?

[pintxo]

For me, this is about ensuring that all 100 companies play along the same rules. If, while following the same rule book, 10 are significantly more successful than the others, fine. If another 20 are significantly less successful, also fine.

What is no fine, is having some companies be exceptionally successful by breaking some rules. Think insider trading, it's a highly profitable business for those risking it, but has a long term negative impact on the market. Therefore we, as a society, via our proxy, the government, decided to enforce rules forbidding insider trading.

The above answers who. This leaves the question of sensibility, I am afraid there will hardly every be consensus on what is sensible or not within a diverse enough group of people. If you'd ask a bunch of investment bankers about sensible rules for banking regulation, I'd assume you'd get quite a different answer than by asking a bunch of consumer rights activists. Our current solution to this problem of finally arriving at a single "sensible" rule is the democratic process / parliament. I guess most would agree this process seems to be sub-optimal, but it seems there are not too many other options on the table.