Cory Doctorow

I'm a...

I think markets are a useful tool, but I don't think they're the best way of organizing everything.

But, you know, I do understand that in the theory of markets, the idea is that when companies do bad, they do bad financially.

And, you know, this is a bedrock.

Adam Smith and Wealth of Nations, he says, you know, it's not through the beneficence of the baker that we get our bread.

It's through his self-regard, right?

The baker is motivated to give you a good loaf of bread because he knows that if he gives you a bad one, you'll buy it.

your bread somewhere else and he'll go out of business.

And so when you have that being short-circuited because of policies, and I want to stress here, these are not like nebulous, you know, like a bad idea from a politician.

These are very specific policies that had this very foreseeable outcome.

When companies can take advantage of those policies to mistreat you and do well, then I'd say that that's in shitified.

So it's not really about which of these symptoms they're showing.

It's about what's happening when they exhibit these symptoms.

Well, so there are four things that discipline companies, this is the term economists use, discipline is like when something bad happens to you because you've done something bad.

And there are four forces that discipline companies historically, and we can see how they've all been eroded.

So the first one, as you mentioned, is competition, right?

It's not, it doesn't matter if you're the only restaurant in town and you serve a bad meal, if there's nowhere else to go, it kind of doesn't matter.

People are still going to show up and eat there.

I mean, we've all had this experience on the other side of the TSA checkpoint where you really do have

effectively the only restaurant in town, right?