Starbucks predatory practices, and 'the will of the people'

Lawton, you made a video about the predatory business practices of Starbucks and asked how this will be dealt with in a free market or how we dealt with in the absence of government regulation.

Specifically, I think that in a free market, some businesses like Starbucks would continue to engage in tactics that would get slammed by some people as predatory and anti-competitive. I think it's important to remember that people currently can choose not to patronize Starbucks. They can choose to avoid it because they disapprove of Starbucks' business practices, and maybe many people do so already.

We don't know exactly how many people are making that kind of choice. The extent to which people feel strongly that businesses should not behave in certain ways will be the extent to which people take the trouble to inform themselves about which businesses are actually behaving that way and then avoid them.

So, in other words, people who feel strongly enough against Starbucks' business practices will have already stopped patronizing Starbucks. They may even be spreading the word about Starbucks' lowdown tactics. Meanwhile, Starbucks is able to perpetrate its so-called predatory practices only to the extent that people prefer to buy coffee at Starbucks than they do at rivals.

So, apparently, on aggregate, people value what Starbucks offers more than they care about and object to Starbucks' predatory business practices. If and when people on aggregate care more about stopping these predatory practices than they do about the value that they currently get from shopping at Starbucks, then Starbucks will not be able to continue in the same way.

Whether we personally disapprove of what Starbucks is doing or not, I think it's important to notice that leaving the market alone gives a situation that does a much better job accurately reflecting the will of the people than having a blanket ban on predatory practices does.

Since the goal of democracy is to have a government that reflects the will of the people, to the extent that we think the market is a good idea — and as an aside, my dog thinks so — to the extent that we do, regulation is redundant in this area because people are already revealing their values in a very direct way by either shopping at Starbucks or by boycotting Starbucks.