link to original reddit post by /u/Perleflamme


As an entrepreneur, there is one aspect that is crucial to learn about business: mitigating risks.

When you see there's a risk, you have to assess its costs, when it can happen and how frequently it can happen. It helps you take it into account in your costs so that you propose relevant prices for your profit. The biggest problem in such risks is when you can't clearly assess them, which creates an uncertainty about the risk, uncertainty you also have to take into account.

Sadly, for the eyes of most unaware people, these costs actually are profit: they don't see the risks you've seen and will suffer from the survivor bias anytime they see an entrepreneur who's successfully taken these risks into account and got lucky enough not to suffer from any such costs yet.

And there are several of these risks even within a free market. But within a state like the ones we have, it's even more the case.

The most known risk is monetary inflation itself. You never know exactly by how much you'll get value taken from your money, which is a problematic uncertainty. There are some consumer indexes about it, but there are many limits with such indexes, keeping the uncertainty high.

Another risk, less known by people who aren't entrepreneurs, is the blur of existing regulations and future regulations. Existing regulations are sometimes pretty confusing, with some specific cases being in the unknown, waiting for a case to be judged. And the same goes obviously for any future regulation. When you are managing a business that will need a few years before being profitable, the threat of a potential regulation dooming such business to unprofitability is a pretty big risk that needs assessment and mitigation.

These two risks are the boogeymen of the state disrupting the market through fear of coercion, either by taking more or less from produced value or by preventing more or less creation of value. These risks make sure there are "lucky" competitors, in practice being favored by the state, as well as unlucky ones.

This fear is a big inducer of market disruption between competitors. Notably, it increases the gap between favored competitors and others, worsening the ability for everyone to compete and thus preventing the market from working as expected.