I think a great function of elected representatives would be keeping an eye out for these types of businesses that are societal "code smells" indicating something is wrong, and looking at the regulatory and legislative environment to see what would be changed to make those businesses obsolete.

Those who are pro-market probably consider the companies cropping up to be evidence that legislation is not needed (as the market is addressing the issue). I'm not such a person, fwiw.

yeah, it's a failure mode of the open market. "We've allowed services to exist that unnecessarily cost you money so the solution is more services that will take more money." If we're being honest, at some point the golden cow of Efficiency is undermined.

The societal ethics of Ozempic are an example of this. We've created policies and subsidies that flood the food market with unhealthy processed food to the point that the cheapest option is an unnatural amount of calories (compare US obesity rates to the rest of the world), so the solution is a pharma product that takes an additional cut of your wallet. It's an expensive solution to an expensive problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.

The software analogy is it's always easier to slap on one more piece of duct tape tech debt than to do the difficult thing and refactor the whole thing (acknowledging that part of the refactoring difficulty is you're not guaranteed to end up in a better state than you started from...)

I would definitely consider myself pro-market, and "market > government" has proven itself a pretty good default time and time again. That doesn't mean nothing should ever be regulated.

I don't think any free market capitalist outside of the most extreme libertarians think that markets should be completely unregulated. It is well known that free markets have areas where they are market failures or can never be Pareto efficient. Basically any "tragedy of the commons" type scenario is such a case. Unfortunately governments like to get their grubby fingers into everything and try to regulate their way out of problems.

Broken window fallacy

The do-not-call list was created under Bush 2, right?

More pragmatically, the fact that such a business exists might be a sign that we're too late to regulate this. Now there is a constituency who can use the profits from keeping the system broken to lobby to keep the system broken. Look at TurboTax as an example, or defense contracting reform, or the affordable care act. Within the rules of neoliberal capitalism, you can't really use the government to address problems that somebody somewhere is making money from.

They do keep an eye out, but for lobbying money. The tax system is a good example.

For anyone missing context: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

It's not just Intuit. I doubt that there would be tax breaks specifically for owners of private jets if not for lobbying from companies like Cessna.

Still waiting on anything to be done about rent to own businesses. The businesses that rely solely on exploiting the people in a bad position bother me so much, they should at least have some kind of limits on their usury.

Unfortunately the people they "serve" would get nothing as nobody can afford to lend to a bad credit risk at reasonable rates. Of course a lot of what they are selling are luxuries that people with bad credit shouldn't have, but then we have to ask what the alternative is. (most places have terrible public transit so you have to get such people in a car. You don't need a TV for movies but you can't really live life without internet anymore as many forms assume online and the alternatives don't work well)

It's hard to argue against that. I suppose it's not that they even exist, it's just the unreasonable amount they profit on the items. If it's purely because they cannot attain items another way, they markup should be more apparent maybe? It just hurts seeing young and disadvantaged people being taken advantage of.

A lot of companies, most, will leave marginalized people behind explicitly to avoid developing solutions for their edge cases. "We don't want those customers." It's come to the point where they try to exclude them up front by requiring 2FA via SMS to establish accounts.

I like the term "societal code smells"

For sure. I hate excessive regulation, but if companies keep poisoning the well, action has to be taken

The problem is that "excessive regulation" often means "regulations that inconvenience me". Often regulations are put in place to help somebody else, and they are met with wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Some regulations help me. I'm glad I don't have to sort through all the pipes to find lead free ones. However some hurt me - I know very well how to do electric work and so having to hire an electrician costs me money I don't have (as opposed to an inspector who is much cheaper since they only verify I did the work right).

In my area the homeowner can do all electrical work. Still needs inspected.

Are you sure you need to hire an electrician in your jurisdiction?

This is specific to my town, if I lived across the street in a different town I wouldn't need to. Unfortunately I didn't know this detail until after I bought the house.

Typically, when this happens and it's a local law like this it's because something really bad happened in the past.

I know, for example, the town of Cripple Creek, CO requires all their buildings to be made out of bricks. Pretty annoying. But it's because the entire town burned down twice in the 19th century.

So, maybe, someone in the past killed a bunch of people with bad electrical work.

This isn't excessive at all. Making it easy to unsubscribe from things is totally reasonable to regulate in any world.

One that stung me the other day, Amazon, a $152 charge showing up on my card.

Realized that it was an annual renewal of Prime. No email notification or anything. Dig around, there is an option to get a reminder email, but it defaults to off.

This is a growing trend too, reduced or no notification of renewal, even on annual subscriptions, so you get hit with a three digit charge out of nowhere (not that it's not our responsibility to track these things, but many of us do so less than we'd like).

I refuse to sign up for subscriptions in many cases for that reason. Same reason I won't sign up for 6 months no payments or interest for things I'm buying - by paying cash I ensure I won't forget to pay in 6 months and then just get the minimum payment withdrawn. Large parts of the world are built to scam you and they know how to make scams seem like a good deal.

Why, when it was already solved by the market!? /s