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Originally Posted by The_Dunedan
Nobody is impervious to shunning; in commercial terms it's called a boycott. Ask Fuji, Smith & Wesson, Exxon, and the Montgomery Transport Authority how those work. There are no more monopolies anymore (aside from the State monopoly on Force), so no one company is -that- important to any one market, and with todays rapid flow of information none ever will be again, not until Shipstones are invented and probably not even then.
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So how would one go about boycotting BP? When you're filling your car, how can you tell whether the gas you're pumping was drilled by BP? I know BP has a chain of gas stations, but I'm also pretty sure that they sell gas to independent gas stations too. How do you tell which of the plastic products you use were created using BP oil? What would stop BP from simply selling their oil to folks in less boycott-prone markets? I don't think an actual boycott of BP would ever work.
In a more general situation, what happens when companies commit unethical activities which aren't of sufficient scale to inspire enough public ire to bring about a boycott?
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You miss the point. Civil disputes are best handled by the Courts because in such a case the Government has no stake, they stand to gain nothing. When the Gov't itself is the recipient of the penalty (fine, as opposed to judgment), there is a distinct incentive for accusation to become guilt, for hearsay to become evidence, and for justice to become "just us." My primary concern is removing the incentive for the State to enrich and aggrandize itself in the name of "justice."
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Both the state and the market tend toward inefficiency and graft. What I don't understand is why a person would ideologically commit to one over the other. I think that it makes more sense to evaluate the usefulness of each with respect to a given situation.
A sidenote on civil disputes: In Minneapolis, there is a rich tradition among some landlords to keep the damage deposits of outgoing tenants regardless of the condition of the apartment. They do this because it forces the tenant to sue to get the deposit back, a task which deters many of the economically distressed folks who these landlords typically rent to. The tenants who do sue frequently win, and often get punitive damages awarded on top of the original deposit amount. It doesn't matter though, because the city has no mechanism in place to make the landlords actually pay. Oddly enough, the landlords don't seem too inclined to police themselves either. So they don't pay their former tenants a dime, even when court ordered to do so. This is an example of the potential worthlessness of courts to bring about change in the behavior of misbehaving businesspeople.