• AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Unless you’re a Ferengi or Ayn Rand, a free market shouldn’t allow agents within the market to manipulate each other, as that inhibits trades being done solely based on what gives the best value for the least currency, making the market less free. The regulation here isn’t taking away a choice you want to have as supermarkets that run BOGOF offers just set the unit price to the cost of two units, so your choice is between paying for two things and getting two things or paying for two things and only getting one. Effectively, your choice to just buy one thing at a fair price is taken away by supermarkets, and it’s dressed up to make it look like you’re getting a bargain when you pay a fair price for two things and get two things.

    A parenthood licence is a really common trope in dystopian fiction because it’s fundamentally the most authoritarian thing a state could do short of mind control. If you don’t trust a government to decide whether or not there should be BOGOF offers on crisps, you absolutely shouldn’t trust them to decide who gets to have children. For most of the twentieth century, the British government was actively trying to suppress minority political opinions like it being acceptable for people to be homosexual or anti-pollution. If they’d been deciding what the requirements were to get a parenthood licence, they’d absolutely have made people agree to teach their children that it wasn’t okay to be gay etc…