[RaymondDeWitt]

If someone offers to purchase your home or other property, the decision to accept that offer lay with the property owner(s), not the municipality, county, or state who may or may not consider impact to humanity. In what utopia do you think we live?

[seizethegdgap]

You're comparing apples to Zanzibar.

You don't have 300 million people (including heads of state) outside your house (that you jointly own with millions of other people) standing on your lawn interacting with each other and the rest of the world.

[kbenson]

You likely do have people or organizations on the loan to your house though, and they don't really get a say most of the time as long as they can be paid off.

What if instead of a house we were talking about a small business that serves people. Can that business not sell itself to someone else?

Property rights and the government stepping in to force changes don't interact well, and goes against a free market type system. The government does step in sometimes, but usually when they see what's being done as being anti-competitive and hurting people through reducing market effectiveness, not just because they've made some moral judgement. Personally I'm happy they're not doing the latter, I suspect quite a lot of people would not agree with the judgements they were making at any specific time, depending on the specific groups in power.

[andrepd]

Property rights and the government stepping in to force changes don't interact well, and goes against a free market type system. The government does step in sometimes, but usually when they see what's being done as being anti-competitive and hurting people through reducing market effectiveness, not just because they've made some moral judgement.

Tobacco advertising, pollution, lead gasoline... Clearly we do make moral choices and, as a democracy, pass laws restricting some activities. The world is not encompassed by The Profit Motive.

I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.

[kbenson]

> Tobacco advertising, pollution, lead gasoline... Clearly we do make moral choices and, as a democracy, pass laws restricting some activities.

We do, but I think it's rare, and much rarer than that list would imply. I see most of those as clear issues of public health. The one where that's a harder claim to make, advertising, it's about making the market function better. Free markets requires require widely distributed and accurate information to function correctly, and false information is extremely damaging to a free market.

> I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.

Neither am I. I'm not some free market only anti-regulation type. I think a completely unregulated market is trivially shown to be unworkable by our own history, so regulation is required to curtail blatant market manipulation. I even think more regulation restricting the size of large companies (or disincentivizing them) would be useful, but I think they need to be applied to foreign companies as well or we're just hurting ourselves without solving any problem.

There's probably a hundred ways that is infeasible and has problems, but it's obvious there are real problems to address with inequality and outsized companies with outsized influence, and something needs to change. I'm just hesitant to couch it in moral terms when it comes to what the government can and should do, because I think that's a slippery slope.

[UncleMeat]

People claim that free markets, capitalism, and government noninterference lead to good outcomes.

Then when we look at examples of these things causing harm rather than leading to good outcomes, people shout and say "Hey you can't do that, its a free market!"

If people want to use the argument that free markets should be able to cause harm if they want then people need to stop using the argument that free markets are good because of all the good they consistently do.

[kbenson]

I don't think that's an accurate assessment of my position or point. You can see my reply to your sibling comment for further explanation from me. In short I don't think a free market is a panacea or perfect, but I do think it's a tool that when used appropriately and kept in check to keep it's known deficiencies from making it a net negative, it's better than what else we have available.