[ETH_start]

>You can’t possibly say, in good faith, that it think this was legal, can you? Of course it wasn’t. It was totally legal discharging some of the less odious things into the river despite going through a residential neighborhood about 500 feet downstream

That is exactly my point. Nobody would dispute that bad things would happen if you don't have laws against dumping pollution in the commons and enforce those laws.

>Doesn’t matter.

It does matter when we're trying to compare the overall effect of various economic systems. Like the anti-capitalist one versus the capitalist one.

>What someone said in 2023 has no bearing on what businesses did in 2020 based on the best available science and their motivations for doing it.

Well that's an entirely different argument than you were making earlier. There was no evidence that masks outside of a hospital setting were a critical health necessity in 2021 and the intuition against allowing them for customer-facing employees proved sound in 2023 when comprehensive studies showed no health benefit from wearing them.

[chefandy]

> exactly my point

Ok, so you’re saying that because bad things would happen anyway then it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal? So you’re just going to ignore how much worse it would be if there were just no laws at all? Corporate scumbags will push any system to its limit and beyond, and if you change the limit, they’ll change the push. Just look at the milk industry in New York City before food adulteration laws took effect. The “bad things will happen anyway” argument makes total sense if you ignore magnitude. Which you can’t.

> anti capitalist

If you think pointing out the likelihood of corporate misbehavior is anti-capitalist, you’re getting your subjects confused.

> 2021

Anywhere else you want to move those goalposts?

[ETH_start]

I'm saying that under any political ideology or philosophy, those things would be illegal and effectively enforced. So this is not a failing of any particular ideology, this is just a human failing showing how it's difficult to enforce complex laws in a complex world.

I think what you're promoting is anti-capitalism, meaning believing that imposing heavy restrictions beyond simply laws against dumping on the commons is going to make us better off, when it totally discounts the enormous positive effect that private enterprise has on society and the incredible harm that can be done through crude attempts to regiment human behavior and the corruption that it can breed in the government bureaucracy.

See, "everything I want to do is illegal" for the flip side of this, where attempts to stop private sector abuse lead to tyranny:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120402151729/http://www.mindfu...

As for the company mask policies, those began to change in 2021 mostly, not 2020.