[Brian_K_White]

Harnessing knowledge of human nature does not require government support. Governments don't create human nature.

They use the government where possible, but as just one of countless tools. They don't always get what they want from the governemnent, yet they still make money. As often as not, corporations end up making more money as a result of losing some fight with a government.

All they need to make money is activity. Any activity, even "the government just took away something we were using and dinged us for $200M" 6 months later they are worth twice what they were before, because that was big activity.

If the government takes away a toy they were making money from, they just figure out some other new toy, and in the end the shake-up and (forced) opportunity for change was worth more than what they were making from the status quo.

[dventimi]

> Harnessing knowledge of human nature does not require government support

Yeah but fencing it off from others does require government support. If it's human nature to create, it's also human nature to copy. If you create some new worthwhile invention, I'll just copy your invention without even asking you, and without the government there's nothing you can do to stop me.

[Brian_K_White]

No, it does not. It's just one of countless levers.

There are countless things anyone can copy or do for free already right now, that countless people pay a company for, for no reason at all. No government enforcement of anything involved.

[dventimi]

> There are countless things anyone can copy or do for free already right now, that countless people pay a company for, for no reason at all.

Name one.

[Brian_K_White]

3% tax on every transaction in your entire life going to Visa by using a debit card instead of cash.

There are people (not huge corps in this case) selling CDRs of PDFs from archive.org on eBay. But more to the point, people buying them.

The completely intangible nothing that differentiates a Burberry bag from any other medium quality bag.

Now that last one almost sounds like the opposite point since the intangible nothing is exactly what the government is protecting there, but the government does not enforce that you need to pay Burberry to get a bag exactly like it in both quality and aesthetic, but people voluntarily do anyway.

[dventimi]

>>> There are countless things anyone can copy or do for free already right now, that countless people pay a company for, for no reason at all.

>> Name one.

> 3% tax on every transaction in your entire life going to Visa by using a debit card instead of cash.

There's a reason for that: Visa and MasterCard have monopoly power obtained via anti-competitive practices which were enabled by contract law. Visa and MasterCard prohibited member banks from issuing their own cards. Discover and American Express among others sued Visa and MasterCard for this about 15 years ago.

> the government does not enforce that you need to pay Burberry to get a bag exactly like it in both quality and aesthetic

The government does enforce that. A potential Burberry competitor cannot sell a bag "exactly like" Burberry's because to do that it would have to have the Burberry logo, which is a trademark protected by federal law.

[Brian_K_White]

But all the government is enforcing or protecting is an identity, not a thing. Burberry convinces people to do something they don't have to do, EVEN to get a bag of the same style and quality.

What do the customers get? They get nothing more than the social status of other people seeing them have it. That value is something that doesn't exist except that Burberry created it out of thin air. The tools that Burberry uses to to produce those sales are not the government protection of the exclusive right to sell a bag of a certain style, it's the knowledge of human nature, in this case, status displays.