| vivster said: Because it is socially acceptable. Some things have existed so long thjat people are treating it as tradition and would never let go. 2nd hand market is inherently harmful to businesses but it has always existed, so it stays. Something being legal does not represent its morality. Compare it with smoking. If smoking didn't exist and someone would introduce it today, it would be immediately banned because it is inherently harmful to everything. But smoking is legal despite its harmfulness just because it has been around for so long and as such is socially accepable. You could argue that 2nd hand is accepted because it's pro-consumer but that's bull. Nobody cares about consumer protection or things would be different around here. |
Second hand market is good to the environment, though, since it effectively recycles things that would be discarded instead. Not to mention it benefits both the buyer and the seller, one because it gets a lower-priced product it might otherwise not even have acess and the other since it gets money from something without any further use.
Since you paved the way for such insane exercise of logic let's say nobody ever thought about it but today someone came up with the brilliant idea of reseling stuff it bought once already (could the supply chain even be conceived before that?). I can't honestly fathom how you possibly can believe it would be banned instead of flat out winning the Nobel prize on economy and being lauded by the Greenpeace and the like as a planet saviour.
And the law might not be the same as ethics or morality but it's definitely intertwined with both and as such tend to reflect the prevailing views of a certain society. No law is intrinsically dissociated of a moral value. In democracies if something is "wrong" enough to a majority of people it will eventually become illicit. Thankfully, the rest of us don't see anything wrong with the freedom to sell your own stuff.
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