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"