It's more like you know that someone is manipulating the bets on the horse race, possibly even forcing results by paying off the competitors. If you do nothing, you are picking winners (the betting house) and loosers (the betters), if you do something you reverse that.
So which is it? Can you help me out here?
As for myself, I'm certain that silence is not consent. It's a freely-made choice not to take part in something.
Thus, doing nothing is not equivalent to picking winners. Picking winners is when you ... wait for it ... pick winners.
Not in all situations, doing nothing is doing nothing. Take the famous trolley problem. By doing nothing you pick 5 people to die, if you do something you pick 1 person to die. One of those will come true, either inaction or action will determine which. But that also means your inaction is an action of yours to force an outcome. This doesn't necessarily mean it's the outcome you want or the outcome that is preferred. Inaction can be the worst type of action to take in some scenarios, but it is the action of non-intervention that creates an outcome regardless. Inaction doesn't mean you consent to the outcome either.
If you are not in a position of authority, whoever is in that position can’t take your silence as consent of their choices.
For the former, the idea (I think) is that if you don't consent to something, speak up to make a difference.
In the latter, it's more that one should not assume consent on the part of another, presumably in the context of a sexual partner.
Governments are nowhere near that level of rigour or coherency, especially if you look at EU anti-trust. The USA at least requires the government to demonstrate some actual harm to consumers in court. EU anti-trust requires a single bureaucrat to decide that competitors were harmed, and they can then levy any fine they like which goes straight into the EU Commission's coffers. It can only be appealed in some sort of court after the fine is paid, and the court is packed with judges who want to see the EU expand (via spending), so that's cold comfort.
That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.
Many arguments about anti-trust do implicitly assume the US model, which at least has some tenuous connection to harm to the general public. That isn't really true internationally, yet ramped up anti-trust in the USA would absolutely be taken as a green light by other parts of the world to whack US firms with enormous fines for conduct that isn't actually bad in any way.
Have you ever watched sports? The referee always has an impact whether they blow the whistle or not. Every rule requires some level of interpretation or fitting to a given situation. Some sports (mainly soccer) don't have rules, they explicitly have "laws of the game" because it's understood that they are to be interpreted.
> That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.
...you know regulators don't get to keep any money right? Their job is to set market rules, enforce them, and break up any competitor who gains too much market power. Where exactly is the conflict of interest? Historically, most shareholders wind up making more money off the future value of the broken-up interests than they did with the original conglomerate.
It seems like you are arguing from an EU standpoint, and I don't know anything about their antitrust history, so I'm not going to try and defend or interpret what Europe does.
This is exactly my point. They don't ... in America. In the EU anti-trust fines are both created by and collected by the Commission, specifically, a high ranking Commissioner. Those people are selected not for any particular expertise in their subject area but rather nominated by countries and selected for political reasons. The money goes straight into the general budget of the Commissioner's employer, and then handed out in "solidarity" payments, subsidies, bureaucrat salaries and other priorities of the Commission.
One of the reasons Americans are so “anti-bureaucracy” is because of precious bureaucratic oversteps.
It’s pretty well established the EUs administrators strongly value the influence I’d their own agencies (with some exceptions).
A good US example is the military. Army, Navy, Marines, etc. are in constant competition. Do any of the generals or admirals get to take home their funding?
It's an interesting point. To me it has merit.