[fwip]

Many things a government does would be illegal if private companies did them. For example, prison, the draft, and taxes. The government is allowed to do it because we (as a society) believe it's better for the government to do these things than private individuals or companies.

[yonran]

Can you give examples of the topic at hand, price fixing, that are justified? There are a handful of progressive forms of price fixing (e.g. minimum wage laws), but many others should be added to the Niskanen Center’s list of bad regulations in the Captured Economy.

[__loam]

Utilities that trend towards natural monopolies due to high barriers to entry like water and electricity infrastructure are often run by the government or heavily regulated because pricing would be extortionate if the market were allowed to set prices.

[yonran]

Fair enough, utility regulations fix prices except in the opposite direction. Without zoning, landowners could not act as a cartel since that would violate antitrust laws, whereas without utility regulation, a natural monopoly could set prices as high as the market will bear.

[keerthiko]

Yep, basic human rights are priceless, and by capitalist mechanics, their pricing will always converge at "how much can we get away with in the current economy?" Government oversight is the only way we currently have to manage this somewhat.

As an example in support of this, healthcare is barely price-regulated and hardly run by the government in America, and is thus extortionate.

[yonran]

> As an example in support of this, healthcare is barely price-regulated and hardly run by the government in America, and is thus extortionate.

They are supply-regulated by governments. According to Niskanen Center, the high cost of health care is due to the American Medical Association limiting new accredited medical schools and certificate-of-need laws limiting new hospitals. https://www.niskanencenter.org/faster_fairer/liberating_the_...

[__loam]

"Named after William A. Niskanen, an economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, it states that its "main audience is Washington insiders", and characterizes itself as moderate."

Barf. These seem like very erudite reasons when really the issue is running healthcare as a balkanized private system with opaque pricing information that patients often don't see until after they receive care is fundamentally an inefficient system. The government could run a single payer system at a loss and it would be cheaper than what we have now.

[fwip]

Sure, zoning and taxi medallions are two examples of justified "price fixing."

[rrrix1]

You have heard of the Prison Indistrial Complex right? Our Prisons have been For-Profit for a long time now. Totally legal, government sanctioned privatized penitentiaries.

[fwip]

Yes, I have. Perhaps I should have made clear that putting people in prison was the thing that was illegal for private companies, not operating a prison.