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0 pointsrachofsunshine8mo ago0 comments

Because we know that not doing so leads to bad outcomes, and in some cases, to outright catastrophe.

A person who was not invested in subprime mortgages in 2006 had no skin in the game - yet the fact that others did invest in subprime mortgages created instabilities that threatened them. Virtually everyone agrees, in retrospect, that something should have been done then. But it wasn't, with precisely the justification you're articulating here. The problem is that that person did in fact have skin in the game, because the outcome had important ramifications for their life even if those ramifications were not in the form of direct financial losses.

Now, sure, your ability to buy furry porn is very different from sparking a global recession. But you're implicitly articulating a very strong claim here, that you cannot regulate economic activity to which you are not a party. That has a clear counterexample well within the memories of most people reading this thread.

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I think we agree that private individuals should be able to purchase legal content from the people who produce it. Without action here, that will become either impossible or very difficult, to the point of having a major chilling effect. I think we also agree that businesses should generally have the right to conduct business as they see fit, both because it allows the exploration of new ideas and because market economics is a powerful force for increasing productivity.

To me, that says that there is a tension between two irreconcilable rights. On one side, we have the rights of businesses to act in their economic best interest (which is important!). On the other side, we have the rights of individuals to (actually and with reasonable effort) engage in lawful private microeconomic activity. And when you encounter such a tension, you need to consider:

- How important the rights are

- How much of one you get by sacrificing some of the other

In this case, I would consider the ability of individuals to conduct microeconomic activity more important than the ability of corporations to conduct what is effectively a PR campaign (since no one seems to be of the opinion that payment processors are actually taking a loss on people buying porn, they're just caving to political pressure). And I think the restriction of payment processors here is small compared to the potential restriction on private individuals. So to me, the trade-off has a clear winner.

If you disagree with this chain of reasoning, can you explain where?

0 comments

phyzix57618mo ago

I'm not seeing where private citizens are prevented from engaging in lawful private microeconomic activity when a privately owned payment processor doesn't want to engage in certain transactions. The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc. Are these options as convenient in this day and age as tapping a credit card? No, but that doesn't mean everyone is entitled to convenience in every situation.

Also, how do you reconcile the fact that many US citizens, for religious or other reasons, can't in good conscience endorse certain economic exchanges? A government that is supposed to represent the needs of all citizens would fail if it engaged in facilitating transactions that some portion of its population found immoral or inappropriate. The public has no say in private, legal, transactions but public enforcement on private entities is a different story; akin to endorsement.

The best we can do is ensure that private citizens have the freedom to engage in legal transactions. But if we start forcing private entities to participate in every legal transaction, we risk setting a precedent that could backfire. Especially when a future administration decides to enforce or block transactions based on political or ideological grounds that conflict with our own values.

rachofsunshineOP8mo ago

> The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc...everyone is[n't] entitled to convenience in every situation.

These options aren't small impositions, they're sufficient added overhead that they dwarf the value of the transaction itself. Bitcoin is the only one of them that seems vaguely realistic to me, but most people don't (and shouldn't) keep their own crypto wallets and don't (and can't) get paid in crypto, so that still requires interaction with third-party processors on two levels. It needs one level to convert fiat to crypto and vice-versa and another to conduct the crypto transaction.

Put another way, the sites that are shutting down this content clearly have substantial financial incentive not to do so. If they thought they had a reasonable alternative, don't you think they'd be using it? And if decent-sized companies with financial incentives cannot find an alternative that seems practicable, what makes you think private individuals are reasonably able to do so?

The broader issue here is one of monopoly, and I guess it might be helpful to zoom out here a bit. Do you think a company with market dominance should be able to engage in (otherwise legal) anticompetitive practices to suppress new companies in their domain? If it were up to you whether to have anti-trust law, would you have it?

If yes: isn't this essentially the same problem? These payment processors have a duopoly and are suppressing alternatives who would take these payments (and might outcompete them in the market on that basis).

If not: are you not concerned about a failure-state where monopolies (a) control critical sectors like finance with an unbreakable grip, (b) intertwine that grip with governments who want to circumvent civil liberties protections to suppress private action, and thus (c) become a de facto shadow government whose behavior - by virtue of being nominally private - isn't subject to constitutional protections or court oversight?

cesarb8mo ago

> The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc.

As far as I understand, this isn't an option. I'm Brazilian, so I can easily pay with PIX (and I have never used a credit card with Steam, since PIX is just so much more convenient). But Steam isn't allowed to sell me that content; if they try, even if they restrict it only to those who pay with PIX, my understanding is that these two global payment processors will stop working with them. And since unfortunately most of the world doesn't have yet something similar to PIX, that would mean losing access to a lot of people.

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