alt Hacker NewsIt's a totally reasonable position that both regulation and companies exploiting users are wrong. And it's also entirely a moral assertion that markets should resolve to outcomes judged by members of some political apparatus. Likewise, the idea that a third party should interfere with economic relations between two consenting parties is also a moral judgement, not an absolute fact.
Most arguments in favour of regulation cherry pick what they feel are success stories and ignore everything else. Interfering with highly complex and dynamical self-regulating systems has a cost. There are many examples of regulation leading to negative outcomes, and it's also telling that large corporations push for regulation because it's one of the most effective obstacles for competition in a market.
Markets depend on regulations.
Free market absolutists don’t know what they are talking about.
The actual originators of market capitalism, most famously Adam Smith, but also proponents like Milton Friedman, had no such confusion.
In reality, today’s free market absolutists don’t get their ideas from economists (even free market economists). Instead, they get their ideas from terrible mid 20th century novelists (I’ll let you figure out who I’m talking about), who didn’t know much about how anything worked, never mind economics.