[crazy1van]

" On the other hand, regulation was used both to stop an exploitation by the market "

I don't see any evidence that regulation stopped the behavior in this case. Perhaps the law will be used after the fact to sue or jail some people, but it doesn't seem to be what actually stopped the problem.

As another poster said, the class action date ranges end in 2009 because Facebook (a private company) wouldn't play ball.

Capitalism is a messy system, but it does tend to self correct in the long run.

[pron]

The practice stopped because of an agreement reached with the Justice Department[1]. I don't know which theoretical model leads you to believe that capitalism tends to correct itself, as historical evidence suggests otherwise: that the free market tends to converge towards feudalism (in the broad sense) – as happened in the US in the late 19th and early 20th century – or crisis; any corrections in course have always been due to public uproar which led to increased regulation.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/technology/18google.html

[usefulcat]

> Capitalism is a messy system, but it does tend to self correct in the long run.

That's quite a generalization; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[crazy1van]

You are right. My statement is a huge generalization and I will never be able to find hard supporting evidence in the true sense.

However, my general sentiment stems from looking at the well being of the average person across human history. As humans shifted towards a system where people earned for themselves and kept what they earned, the typical human life improved at an astounding rate. On a much smaller scale, I've never seen people work harder than when they had stake in the outcome.

Anecdotes and generalizations, I fully admit. However, I bet many others with a much wider variety of life experiences than I have reach the same conclusion.

[pron]

Actually, human society hasn't "shifted towards a system where people earned for themselves and kept what they earned". Throughout history there have been motions back and forth towards a amore socialist or a more capitalist system. In fact, I'm not sure you can say that we have such a system in any of the Western countries, right now. People don't just work for themselves: they pool a large chunk of their resources together to build common infrastructure necessary for business.

There was one time, however, when human society shifted from a communal hunter-gatherer society to one having private property, and that was the neolithic revolution. It is pretty much universally agreed that it made most people worse off. They had to work more (you're right about that; hunters-gatherers needed to work only 20 hours a week), got more sick, were malnourished, had to give birth to more children, and lived less (until modern technology, that is). It's unclear why this most important revolution in human history happened, but some theories suggest that it was brought about by the only people who benefitted from it: those who quickly became rich.