Discussion
"Binding arbitration" is a widely used contractual term that forces you to surrender your right to sue a company that wrongs you. Instead of suing, binding arbitration forces you to take your case to an "arbitrator"; that is, a lawyer who is paid by the company that cheated you or maimed you or killed your loved one. The arbitrator decides whether their client is guilty, and, if so, how much that client owes you.
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@pluralistic You mentioned the other day you don't see eye to eye with Mark Carney on much, but there is a tremendous bit by Tomaso Padoa-Schioppa quoted in his book "Values":
The theory of capitalism holds that markets are a kind of distributed computer that aggregates trillions of decisions from billions of market participants in order to optimize production and distribution of goods and services, creating a "Pareto-optimal" world where no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
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Whether or not you believe that this computer exists and functions as predicted, one indisputable fact about it is that it requires the freedom to choose in order to work. The point of market-as-computer is that it aggregates decisions, so it can only work if everyone is as free as possible to decide.
But that's not the world capitalists want. For capitalists, the point is to restrict other people's choices in order to maximize your own freedom.
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That's how we get economic doctrines like "revealed preferences": the idea that if a person says they want one thing, but does another thing, then you can tell what they *really* prefer by looking at the latter and disregarding the former. This is the kind of doctrine you can only fully embrace after sustaining the kind of highly specific neurological injury that is induced by taking an economics degree, an injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power.
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Under the doctrine of revealed preferences, someone who sells their kidney to make the rent has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em
Capitalism is supposed to run on risk: the risk of being overtaken by a competitor drives businesses to deliver better services more efficiently, thus producing a bounty for all.
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