You as an individual can stop using a corporation's products way more easily than you as an individual can vote out a government. My personal success with voting out governments is zero, but my success in boycotting corporations is pretty high. Occasionally others have stopped using them as well and they've stopped having a large effect on my life.
>> But what's the difference between a government setting the rules and a corporation deciding the rules? We can vote out a government, but we can't vote out a corporation.
> You as an individual can stop using a corporation's products way more easily than you as an individual can vote out a government. My personal success with voting out governments is zero, but my success in boycotting corporations is pretty high.
That presumes your main interaction with a corporation is by the consumption of its products as a customer. However, that's so often not the case that it might as well be assumed to be false. For instance, you can't boycott Equifax or an industrial chemicals factory that's polluting the air in your city because you're not their customer, but you're still affected by their decisions and rules.
The main difference between a government and a corporation setting the rules is that, in democracies, the government is theoretically accountable to the interests of all citizens while the corporation is only accountable to the interests of its shareholders and (depending on market conditions) its customers.
I don't think a consumer can successfully opt out the way you claim. Maybe for an individual company, but how would one opt out of high-fructose corn syrup being in the market? You can drive yourself nuts trying to find only products without it, but the second you eat out or go to a friends' house you will be consuming it. On the other hand, as a citizen, I can vote in politicians who will heavily tax or ban HFCS.
In this (and many other) cases, government is a far more effective lever for change.
I have several friends who successfully don't consume HCFS, even when traveling or at friends' houses.
On the other hand, your vote for those politicians has near-zero effect. And if it does have an effect and they ban HFCS, then you've just imposed your will on people who wanted cheap sweeteners more than they wanted to avoid the health consequences of HCFS.
> I have several friends who successfully don't consume HCFS, even when traveling or at friends' houses.
If you say so. Are they able to avoid plastic waste, palm oil, and soy-based products? How many hoops should consumers have to jump through before we are allowed to have a healthy market?
> On the other hand, your vote for those politicians has near-zero effect.
Says you. I know a bunch of people who have healthcare because we voted for a certain President and a Congress who could get it done. It had a near-100 effect for all of those people.
> And if it does have an effect and they ban HFCS, then you've just imposed your will on people who wanted cheap sweeteners more than they wanted to avoid the health consequences of HFCS.
I'm not a Republican, I don't care about corporate profits over human well-being. Removing HCFS and similar products from the market is a net good. We already decided that tobacco products should be handled this way, and HFCS specifically is just as unhealthy.
Furthermore, the product choices available to ME are severely distorted by the presence of subsidized, unhealthy corn syrup. By removing it from the market, the American people will get better choices, with minimal medium or long term disruption to the number of choices available.
The issue is the Internet has provided bad actors (including rent-seeking entrenched interests) with the ability to anonymously, cheaply and pervasively spread lies and propaganda. They can precisely manipulate emotionally vulnerable segments, bury informed discussion, manipulate Overton windows, and subvert law and policy making for their own purposes.
Individual choice is of almost no help in managing the problem.
If that's your critique of the private sector, what about governments? I agree that those things are problems, but we're not comparing to an ideal state -- we're comparing to another deeply flawed thing. At least individual choice gets me something in the private sector.
For me “bad actors” includes all bad actors—-whether commercial, governmental or otherwise. They are all potential snake pits and they need to be scrutinized. :-)
But they are what we have to work with. To me it is irrational to refuse to use part of the toolkit (laws and regulation) because ideology.
Mandatory radical transparency is probably a part of any effective mitigation strategy.
We have to be realistic. The “system” cannot be perfected, and trying will cause horrible unintended consequences. It will always be gamed. There will always be charismatic sociopaths and selfish assholes. There will always be injustice and suffering.
But we can try to use the available tools judiciously to keep their negative impact down to an acceptable level.
But how many of the companies that you’ve boycotted are conducting business as usual? Isn’t that the real analog of voting out a government? A single person’s boycott is a drop in the bucket in the same way that a single person’s vote is.
A single person's vote has zero real impact whatsoever unless it's the one that changes the outcome, while each additional business boycotter increases the impact to the company.
> My personal success with voting out governments is zero, but my success in boycotting corporations is pretty high. Occasionally others have stopped using them as well and they've stopped having a large effect on my life.
This isn't even close to an apples-to-apples comparison. You interact with many more corporations than governments. Most of the corporations you interact with have some competition; most of the governments you interact with don't. And voting out a government is hardly the analogue of boycotting a corporation: what's your success rate with voting at all vs your success rate in getting a corporation's board replaced?
It is extremely difficult to opt out of Facebook and Google. I have no beef with Microsoft, but many workers can't boycott them because they're required to use them for work.
Being forced to use a product at work is one thing, but is it really that difficult to opt out of Facebook and Google in one's personal life? Unless one needs to advertise a personal business or something, the former is as easy as deleting your account, and you can drop most of the latter's services in minutes (just use DDG/protonmail/openstreetmap/etc instead). Obviously if you have an Android phone that's another step.
All I'm saying is it can be done, and it needn't be all or nothing: one can proceed in whichever increments make the most sense.
