Things like this mainly occur in markets with little competition, killing of small business causes issues like this. Much of our grievances are caused by our high level of market concentration.
abeppu 43 minutes ago [-]
And notably, we used to have a somewhat progressive corporate income tax which, at least on paper, provided a quantitative disincentive against too much consolidation. Sometimes the merger of A and B would pay a higher rate than A and B separately. And we gave that mechanism up.
plagiarist 28 minutes ago [-]
An assumption required to make capitalism work efficiently is that customers have meaningful choices. Trustbusting is one of the important roles of the government, if it were functional.
jklinger410 2 minutes ago [-]
It's so fun how corporations are protected from individual liability but also their money is treated a speech.
declan_roberts 31 minutes ago [-]
We really need to bring back corporal punishment, both for petty crimes and white collar crimes. The prison sentences don't make sense for the petty crimes, and the fines don't make sense for the white collar crimes.
We need legalize public caning and the stocks.
tancop 3 minutes ago [-]
we dont need new punishments, the system is just backwards. for things like shoplifting and vandalism it should be double or triple damages with no prison. corporate fraud, cartels, pollution, big time tax evasion has to come with 20+ year sentences and fines based on your income like a traffic violation in norway. flat fines just dont work when the criminal is rich.
in general we should be a lot more strict on sexual crimes (sa, trafficking, child abuse but not voluntary prostitution) and white collar/economic ones including wage theft, but less strict on drugs and property. drug possession and non commercial digital piracy should be decriminalized.
violent crimes are mostly in the right place, the big problem there is racist prosecutors and ineffective anti gang programs not the laws themselves but we need to remove death penalty/life without parole everywhere they still exist.
the point is we need a rebalance not a whole new untested mechanic.
john_strinlai 5 minutes ago [-]
>the fines don't make sense for the white collar crimes.
why do we need to jump to caning instead of increasing the fines to something more than an operating expense?
in this case, if the fine was 1000x the profits instead of the other way around, the problem would be solved, right?
Henchman21 17 minutes ago [-]
Along with this we need the revocation of corporate charters and the liquidation of all assets belonging to the owners of any corp that is dissolved in this manner. The penalty for fucking over the public in general should be a lifetime of poverty.
devilbunny 15 minutes ago [-]
The owners of corporations are mostly pension funds and the like.
mlsu 6 minutes ago [-]
Arguably that is worse. If a criminal misuses his own resources to commit crimes and then you take that away from them, it only affects him.
The companies should be liquidated still. That would put the incentives in the correct order.
Varelion 18 minutes ago [-]
The United Monopolies of America
pphysch 7 minutes ago [-]
The Associated Monopolies of America.
xgulfie 18 minutes ago [-]
Same thing keeps happening with DRAM, bread, electricity...
croes 12 minutes ago [-]
Business as usual.
BP, Shell etc. make more profit from ignoring safety and environmental standards than they have to pay in fines for oil spills.
Same is true for FB & Co.
How about the possibility of a death penalty for companies like for people because companies are people, aren’t they?
Justice Department Requires Egg Producers to End Coordinated Benchmark Manipulation that Artificially Inflated Prices Across the Country - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734081 - July 2026
mannanj 17 minutes ago [-]
So isn't this how all major US capitalist companies function now? They look at unethical behavior and fines as a cost-benefits equation. Hardly new that when people make lots of money from something, they pay off your leaders to let them off with a small fine.
cucumber3732842 28 minutes ago [-]
> Basically, consolidation had created concentrated power, and the shock of <whatever> let them exploit it.
Once you see this pattern, you see it everywhere.
>While most normal people at the time thought someone was likely scamming them, that is not the message you heard from the industry, elite media, or economists. Throughout the alleged conspiracy, industry executives and analysts were saying that there was nothing to see except a supply shock of a disease killing lots of hens
The idea that something more nefarious than the bird flue was going on was very unpopular on HN at the time
josefritzishere 40 minutes ago [-]
Crime is legal now if you can get rich fast enough.
pstuart 2 hours ago [-]
That'll show em! (that they should continue with the price fixing).
I look forward to the day when we no longer have a pro-corruption government.
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
win/wind: get caught, pay minor tax; dont get caught, get to keep minor tax
toomuchtodo 1 hours ago [-]
If you want more aggressive anti trust enforcement, voters must vote better, for candidates and administrations that will aggressively enforce.
readthenotes1 1 hours ago [-]
"naked conspiracy to manipulate the price of eggs from 2022-2025. "
Who was in charge during this time period?
jstanley 1 hours ago [-]
2 consecutive pro-corruption governments
mghackerlady 49 minutes ago [-]
not the one in charge of punishing this behaviour
wat10000 54 minutes ago [-]
Surely the relevant question is who was in charge when the punishment was decided, not who was in charge when the misbehavior occurred.
mrguyorama 45 minutes ago [-]
People always overlook how crappy our courts are.
They have been absurdly pro corporate for decades. They will bend over backwards to accept an absurd legal arguments from corporate attorneys, yet they never seem to have that level of credulity for people like you and me.
That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!
We have to push for courts that don't treat corporations with white gloves.
saghm 13 minutes ago [-]
> That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!
And then in the aftermath of that, the media turned the most well-known victim into a punchline and a oft-cited example of absurd litigation by people who don't know any better.
Why is it people have such a hard time understanding that this is what we want markets to do? If there is a scarcity of some resource, the prices rise and this motivates producers to produce more and consumers to consume less, until an equilibrium is found. On net, this means that we can have more of what we want for less effort over time. Yes, the people doing this profit from it. That's why they do it.
miyoji 38 minutes ago [-]
Collusion is not a market force and is actually highly illegal and corrupting of markets, so this doesn't seem relevant at all.
22 minutes ago [-]
Henchman21 18 minutes ago [-]
Greed isn’t “forgotten” its reined in by regulation.
vikingerik 46 minutes ago [-]
Consumers don't want to understand it because they don't want to consume less.
smokefoot 36 minutes ago [-]
I mean no. The LIBOR analogy is appropriate. Large, long-term egg supply contracts are fixed to an index and that index was manipulated. That's criminal conspiracy and price fixing, not just a liquid market.
That's notably different from say the current scrum for HBM where the demand truly came as a surprise and scarce supply gets bid up.
Micron's windfall is justified and natural as these things go. The egg windfall was manufactured and criminal.
treis 10 minutes ago [-]
LIBOR didn't triple the rate. I don't doubt that they screwed around at the margins but the extreme volatility in egg prices were predominantly caused by the underlying economic factors.
SpicyLemonZest 32 minutes ago [-]
As the article says, people have a hard time understanding it because it turned out not to be what's happening. I was on the other side of the debate, I thought it was absurd, but it turns out egg company executives really were sending each other messages saying "let's manipulate the price upwards so that we can make more money".
Rendered at 16:31:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
We need legalize public caning and the stocks.
in general we should be a lot more strict on sexual crimes (sa, trafficking, child abuse but not voluntary prostitution) and white collar/economic ones including wage theft, but less strict on drugs and property. drug possession and non commercial digital piracy should be decriminalized.
violent crimes are mostly in the right place, the big problem there is racist prosecutors and ineffective anti gang programs not the laws themselves but we need to remove death penalty/life without parole everywhere they still exist.
the point is we need a rebalance not a whole new untested mechanic.
why do we need to jump to caning instead of increasing the fines to something more than an operating expense?
in this case, if the fine was 1000x the profits instead of the other way around, the problem would be solved, right?
The companies should be liquidated still. That would put the incentives in the correct order.
BP, Shell etc. make more profit from ignoring safety and environmental standards than they have to pay in fines for oil spills.
Same is true for FB & Co.
How about the possibility of a death penalty for companies like for people because companies are people, aren’t they?
Egg Libor Was Also Manipulated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756256 - July 2026
Justice Department Requires Egg Producers to End Coordinated Benchmark Manipulation that Artificially Inflated Prices Across the Country - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734081 - July 2026
Once you see this pattern, you see it everywhere.
>While most normal people at the time thought someone was likely scamming them, that is not the message you heard from the industry, elite media, or economists. Throughout the alleged conspiracy, industry executives and analysts were saying that there was nothing to see except a supply shock of a disease killing lots of hens
The idea that something more nefarious than the bird flue was going on was very unpopular on HN at the time
I look forward to the day when we no longer have a pro-corruption government.
Who was in charge during this time period?
They have been absurdly pro corporate for decades. They will bend over backwards to accept an absurd legal arguments from corporate attorneys, yet they never seem to have that level of credulity for people like you and me.
That famous McDonalds hot coffee case, McDonalds had caused serious injuries to hundreds of people previously and demonstrated serious negligence and a willing disregard for the safety of their customers and the courts, and yet when the jury came back with a couple million dollars in punitive damages, the judge still massively reduced that penalty!
We have to push for courts that don't treat corporations with white gloves.
And then in the aftermath of that, the media turned the most well-known victim into a punchline and a oft-cited example of absurd litigation by people who don't know any better.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFa2bQlWcAARYNB.jpg
Why is it people have such a hard time understanding that this is what we want markets to do? If there is a scarcity of some resource, the prices rise and this motivates producers to produce more and consumers to consume less, until an equilibrium is found. On net, this means that we can have more of what we want for less effort over time. Yes, the people doing this profit from it. That's why they do it.
That's notably different from say the current scrum for HBM where the demand truly came as a surprise and scarce supply gets bid up.
Micron's windfall is justified and natural as these things go. The egg windfall was manufactured and criminal.