EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

That it is just a fact of life. Every creation is based directly or indirectly on past creations, then how about looking after the rights of entities that contributed to the content created? Should content creators share their revenue? That places them in privileged position. What about profit content creators get from exposure given by aggregators? Should they share too? And so on. This is just terribly stupid.

This is true, and a lot of Google's practices are monopolistic/hegemonic.

However banning/taxing links is not the answer.

Nobody is saying the amount is fixed over time, but that doesn't make it inexhaustible. At any given point there is a finite amount of overhead it's possible to absorb before you're doing more harm than good. If you think your new regulations are more justifiable than your ancestors' old regulations, nobody is saying you can't repeal the old ones to leave more surplus for the new ones. But if you overload a ship, it sinks.

> Thing is there's been a fair bit of growth since my childhood, or even since the widespread adoption of the www. Just compare the sheer amount of crap people have compared to a child of even the 90s. Plenty of slack left for some regulation and changes without even the cost of compliance of 20 years ago - there's so much more money in the system.

"Progress creates surplus" is not a rule. It very often moves it from one place to another.

For example, the rise of refrigeration and microwave ovens in workplaces made it more attractive to bring lunch from home. That means less business for restaurants and fewer customers to amortize fixed costs like rent, which reduces the allowable regulatory overhead before the restaurant goes out of business.

> If a business is so marginal that it can't cope with a change in interest rates or a new regulation or tax rate then any number of other tiny events would have sunk it anyway.

"Don't worry about marginal costs, marginal businesses would fail anyway" is how you successfully boil the ocean. You destroy the marginal businesses -- which is obviously bad -- but you also push an entirely different set of businesses toward the margin, so that when the next regulation or interest/tax rate hike comes, they also sink when they would previously have been able to survive.

And the entire issue here is that it's cumulative. We started with a business that had $20 in costs and $100 in value. That is nowhere near marginal. One regulation that increases their costs by $5 is easily survivable. But twenty such regulations bankrupts them. You have to weigh your alternatives, you can't have everything at the same time.

[...]

Just because people earn less and have less money, the economic output in goods won't change. Goods will simply become cheaper.

What really matters is WHERE the money is removed from the system because companies/individuals supposedly hoard it, pay low wages, or cost of compliance is high. Because that place/group/country will become poorer compared to the rest of the world or country.

There's many complex interactions when you think about economies at global or nation scale.

To get to the matter at hand:

> Or business will pass the compliance costs to the consumer, thus raising price for all.

Yes. They may need to hire two additional people or change their manufacturing process to a more expensive one to comply with some safety standards and whatnot. The good might become slightly more expensive compared to other goods, and some economic output will be lost. But everyone will have to do that, which gets me to your next point:

> Those breaking the law and not complying will have a competitive advantage.

Criminals always had a competitive advantage. It's the job of law enforcement to make sure this doesn't happen - if that doesn't work you have a bigger problem. This argument is useless.

> as well as those large enough to spread the compliance costs over all their production.

Depends on what the compliance cost is. Need to hire an extra guy to do paper pushing for compliance? This cost (maybe) can be spread. Need to use more expensive materials? Bigger corps won't have more advantages here than they had anyways (buy in bulk etc.)

> Wages are the price of work as established by the free market.

That's the theory and mostly true. The problem is a disparity in bargaining power and stakes at wage negotiations. You need organizations selling that "work" who are at least as powerful as their buyers (read: unions).

A lack of unions can force companies (through no fault of their own) to determine wages by the market price of their produce, instead of raising their prices. An union has the power to negotiate wages across entire industries - thus allowing companies to compete without doing so on the backs of their workers. (Edit: This is essentially a way of arriving at a minimum wage for that industry).

> They are simply replaced by more productive workers or robots.

Again. Maybe they should use robots - if a robot can perform the work for less than what could be considered a livable wage for a human worker, the human worker is best used elsewhere. You just made a good argument that minimum wages could increase economic output.

> The most vulnerable members of our society are affected the most, being robbed by the dignity and opportunities of a paid job and being relegated instead to live off the government's teat.

The dignity of a job that is paid so badly that the government has to indirectly subsidize the industry by giving the worker additional government aid, even though he has a paid job? Another great example that the free market fails at setting fair wages. Industries like that should be forced to increase their prices instead of indirectly being subsidized with tax payer money by having their workers receive government aid. Yes: McDonalds & Co. prices may increase - but you were paying that anyway, indirectly, with taxes.