>In the former, you can cause harms that take months or years to fix (and, with enough lobbying, you can make taxpayers foot the bill).
I don't think "years" is enough to convey the potential damage unregulated businesses can cause. The time and resources to fix issues can scale well beyond human timescales. This is clearest when environmental damage is involved, whether it be CO2 emissions that will exist for O(100) years in the atmosphere or loss of biodiversity that took O(10,000) years to evolve.
Here are a couple of concrete examples of companies inflicting eternal costs onto society that were covered well in Tom Scott videos:
I don't think "years" is enough to convey the potential damage unregulated businesses can cause. The time and resources to fix issues can scale well beyond human timescales. This is clearest when environmental damage is involved, whether it be CO2 emissions that will exist for O(100) years in the atmosphere or loss of biodiversity that took O(10,000) years to evolve.
Here are a couple of concrete examples of companies inflicting eternal costs onto society that were covered well in Tom Scott videos:
The Pumps That Must Run Forever, Or Part Of Germany Floods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LseK5gp66u8
Freezing 200,000 Tons of Lethal Arsenic Dust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4nZDSLdIiM