I think I’d say “arbitrageur” rather than “privateer”—they’re not combatants authorized to prey on an opposing state’s commerce, they’re just noticing and fixing (by taking a cut of) an information-value asymmetry. In fact, much of the debate is similar to other arbitrage prohibitions—people hate “price gouging”, “scalping”, “speculation”, and many other similar things.
These are perfectly legitimate in theory, but are based on underlying coordination failures that cause bad feelings, and they tend to cluster with not-OK behaviors (lying, artificial manipulation, interference with competitors, unsanctioned violence, etc.). It’s perfectly reasonable to look at the cluster of behaviors and decide to prohibit the lot, even though it catches some things that are theoretically acceptable.
The hypocrisy angle is interesting—many people seem to prefer that it’s “prohibited, but tolerated at small scale”. I suspect we’ll face a lot of these issues as humanity becomes more densely packed and visibly interconnected—there are a LOT of freedoms and private choices that our intuition says should be allowed, but which we recognize cause massive harm if scaled up. Currently, they’re mostly handled by hypocrisy—saying it’s allowed/disallowed, but then enforcing against egregious cases. I wonder if there are better ways.
I think I’d say “arbitrageur” rather than “privateer”—they’re not combatants authorized to prey on an opposing state’s commerce, they’re just noticing and fixing (by taking a cut of) an information-value asymmetry. In fact, much of the debate is similar to other arbitrage prohibitions—people hate “price gouging”, “scalping”, “speculation”, and many other similar things.
These are perfectly legitimate in theory, but are based on underlying coordination failures that cause bad feelings, and they tend to cluster with not-OK behaviors (lying, artificial manipulation, interference with competitors, unsanctioned violence, etc.). It’s perfectly reasonable to look at the cluster of behaviors and decide to prohibit the lot, even though it catches some things that are theoretically acceptable.
The hypocrisy angle is interesting—many people seem to prefer that it’s “prohibited, but tolerated at small scale”. I suspect we’ll face a lot of these issues as humanity becomes more densely packed and visibly interconnected—there are a LOT of freedoms and private choices that our intuition says should be allowed, but which we recognize cause massive harm if scaled up. Currently, they’re mostly handled by hypocrisy—saying it’s allowed/disallowed, but then enforcing against egregious cases. I wonder if there are better ways.