Agree. Coming up with a piece of legislation that actually works seems impossible. There are a zillion commercial agreements around distribution, exclusivity etc and a lot of business doesn't work without it.

Let's get rid of all of it. Those examples all harm me as a consumer.

"Get rid of all of it"? Here's the thing, laws don't remove bad things from society, they add constraints on the bad things and penalties for violating the constraints.

So you're not proposing getting rid of something (which sounds so nice and simple!), you're proposing creating new restrictions on what businesses can do. Those restrictions have to be defined in a clear, unambiguous way to avoid challenges in court.

I'm saying there's probably no version of your hypothetical law that would stand up in court (not to mention pass a legislature).

To your point of consumer harm, businesses have rights (varying by the law of the land) that must be balanced against consumer rights.

I'm being a little more devil's advocate here and playing fast with some of the practical realities than I might personally hold as an actual opinion so keep that in mind, but:

A business should always be subservient to the general citizens who will make up said business. Following that, consumer rights (citizen rights) should always be promoted over the rights of a business. So I don't know that I take your point about balancing those two things. They seem like separate classes of rights with one that is more important. I guess that's technically still balancing, but in a way that business always loses.

As to writing a law to stand up to scrutiny. I don't know that I have to care about that. That's not my problem to deal with, that's our legislators problem. In fact that should be one of their primary problems, writing laws that stand up to scrutiny that protect abuse of general citizens.

It seems more like a lack of will, which I could speculate on.

Edit: I'll say this, as something reflecting my actual opinion. I tend to agree that this has a high degree of complexity and applying a flippant indiscriminate legislation to ban this won't work and won't stand up to legal scrutiny, though I get the sense you know a lot more about why than I do. That said, I do think we can do better, and if you work backwards from an impossibly high ideal, with a lot of time and effort someone can land on a solution that's better than nothing. I don't think that's impossible. I don't think legislation is necessarily the right way to go about it. I was hesitant to add that part to my initial post but went with it anyway. It isn't aligned entirely with my own beliefs about competition, even though I think the practice of pay for play is kind of gross, and imbalanced and doesn't reflect a superior product.

My sibling comment here is right, businesses are more like people than you are allowing, at least when it comes to protection from government interference.

It's easy to fall into a trap where "business" === "huge rich company", but it's just not that simple.

You say it's a lack of will, but I really don't buy that most people hold your position that anything resembling an exclusive arrangement like we've been talking about should be illegal. Personally I absolutely don't support that sort of blanket rule.

That's fair, I don't even hold my own opinion. I like talking about extremes in so much as what I learn from other people and by looking at the thread it seems to have done the job. You have the benefit of not knowing me, but I suspect if you'd ask one of my friends this entire thread is almost distinctly the opposite of my view on business and legislation.

The businesses are legal fictions which are owned by humans and run by humans. In practice, it's just a group of humans. So any time you assume you are putting the rights of citizens ahead of businesses, you are putting the rights of one set of humans over another set.

It's never simple. It's really hard (/impossible) to come up with good legislation. Much of it creates weird incentives or high costs to enforce or high costs to doing business which are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and citizens in the form of lower dividend checks in retirement.

Saying "it's not my problem" amounts to "i have no idea how to solve this".

You're right I have no idea how to solve this very large problem in society, I'm flattered that you expected me to. Though I'm not sure in reality I have the responsibility to know the answer to any large problems like this. I don't know much about anything really. I can still express the problem however.

I expect my representatives who I do vote for to know answers like this though and that's not unreasonable, its one of the basis of our current system in fact.

Representatives aren't magicians. If you can't do it, they probably can't. It might be terrifying, but it's true. Representatives being able to do things you can't is not the basis for a political system.

Outside of my above hyperbolics that I was pushing for the sake of discussion:

That doesn't terrify me, it makes me question why have them then? I don't need a paper pusher with a loud voice, I want leaders who can solve problems their constituents think are important and take on responsibility of figuring these things out.

If you gave me time to devote to it, a staff, authority, and the right bipartisanship climate I could figure it out.

I don't have an answer, because I spent less than an hour thinking about this problem, and most of that hour was spent starting to understand the nuances involved from a half assed answer I threw out into the void because I could and I was curious to see what people would say, not because I couldn't arrive at an actual solution given the time and resources. I remain convinced this problem is tractable even if its not through legislative means.

I'm not invested in this problem enough to take action though, I'd rather go back to working on my side projects. I am however, invested enough to spend an hour shooting the shit on a message board.

Historically because it was impossible to have everyone vote on everything all the time.

Nowadays you still have the problem in some sense due to trust in voting systems, but theoretically you could run many of the functions of congress via calling a vote to the general population and they could do it on their smart phone or something. Auth would be hard(ish) from a practical perspective. Knowing enough about a topic could be easily resolved via allowing voters to appoint a proxy on certain bills or writ large.