[csense]

I don't like destruction of perfectly usable items, and I think it's terrible that some brands destroy unsold $40 shirts to protect their branding and pricing power, rather than selling them for $20 or giving them away to the poor.

But I like less the implications for private property ownership of this sort of regulation. If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to tell me "no."

And what if there's genuinely no demand? For example, suspenders went permanently out of style at some point in the 20th century. If this law had been in effect at the time, there might be an "orphaned" truckload of suspenders somewhere, getting wastefully shipped from warehouse to warehouse for decades because they're impossible to sell and illegal to destroy.

Fashion is fickle, prone to fads and flights of taste. Suspenders are by no means an isolated case.

An efficient economy needs a means to delete an item when its current owner doesn't want it, nobody else wants it either, and it imposes ongoing storage costs on whoever holds it.

[lores]

If you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.

[bamboozled]

Agree, a corporation can do orders of magnitude more harm than an individual can. It’s called “regulation”.

[dash2]

What evil? I think it would be very hard to have a system of law without corporate personhood. Every time you wanted a law to eg ban x, you would need a separate law for corporations.

[jazz9k]

A company isn't AI or a bot. It's essentially a group of people. It should have the same rights as an individual when it comes to private property.

[__MatrixMan__]

Your reasoning makes sense only if it's just as easy to sentence the group to jail time as it is to sentence the individual--and pretty much everything else about a corporation is set up to make it harder to do that.

[rsynnott]

If it's an unlimited partnership or something, _maybe_. Approximately no companies implicated are, though; they're typically limited liability companies of some sort. A limited liability company demanding human rights feels a bit like having your cake and eating it.

[kranke155]

It is not a group of people. It’s a legal entity that represents their economic interests.

[lores]

There's a sizable logical jump between your second and third statements.

[s3p]

I'm sorry you think that.

[laurex]

This argument might have made sense when property rights were assumed to trump all other concerns, but at this point, that isn't logical. We live in a world where "owning" everything has led to complete lack of responsibility for the effects of corporate behaviours serving short-term profit while all living systems are paying the price. At some point we need to introduce more tension between property rights and common welfare if we plan to make it through the next century.

[rsynnott]

> If I own an item I should be able to destroy it if I want; the government shouldn't be able to tell me "no."

Are you, personally, a large textile company? If not, then you have no need to worry; see the article. If you are, then argh a textile company has become sentient.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Surprisingly enough you doing what you want with your stuff in your own home is different from operating a business at scale, and we can make different laws for the different situations.

[jazz9k]

If I were these companies, I would just give them all in truckloads to the CEO's son, and have them dispose of it.

[amalcon]

It might surprise some people that courts are wise to this sort of thing. Lawmakers generally empower them to ignore such legal fictions.

[patrickmcnamara]

People on HN never been wise to any law. For some reason they think that law operates like a set of instructions that a CPU operates.

[prawn]

Ignoring the fact that they will just ship clothes overseas to be destroyed, could this plan otherwise encourage brands to favour staples rather than aggressively push fleeting fashion? e.g., maybe next time they are a bit more cautious on suspenders or a gaudy t-shirt with huge brand stamped across the front?

[8note]

you own a business that owns the inventory, rather than owning the inventory yourself, no?

if you want to be doing all the things you could do otherwise, you should have full liability for it.

if youve got a boatload of suspenders, you should give them away, pay people to take them, or invent a new use for them. you could turn them into belts or waistbands or something.

even without the major market, there's still going to be niche market for suspenders

[_moof]

We aren't talking about "an item." We're talking about an industry that deliberately over-produces because it's better for their balance sheets, which has significant climate implications. This is precisely the sort of scenario where it makes sense for government to step in.

[pwagland]

Even ignoring that "you" as an individual are not affected by this, there are plenty of things that "you" as an individual cannot do with your own property. For example, a lot of places in the US live under a HOA, and they often restrict what you can do with the frontage of your property. Many people live in places where trees have some form of protected status.