[stretchwithme]

I don't think rules made by coercive government and rules made by industry are the only two possible choices.

If people voluntarily join organizations such as a community that has rules but that cannot be arbitrarily changed without consent and where individuals can leave, even taking their real estate out of the agreement, such an arrangement could still adopt all kinds of standards. This would not a coercive arrangement, but one that people voluntarily join to get the benefits of belonging.

One rule such a community might have could be that all members agree to only buy and sell food that meets certain standards. You would likely have many communities adopting different standards, many of which would likely be BETTER than one ALREADY watered down to satisfy industry.

With such arrangements, it would be possible for people to promote and enjoy standards of their choosing, without having the never-ending struggle over what those standards should be.

Why is it that we all must live be the same rules when many can live side by side? We seem to be ok with other nations choosing their own standards, but not our own countrymen. No, they must live lives designed by committee.

A voluntary rules making community could actually go much further than government can in making rules. This is not a problem when people can vote with their feet and simply end their membership when the rules get to be too much. Try doing that with government.

[wtallis]

What would such a group look like? I'd really like to know how you would go about starting such a group to ensure net neutrality, but even your food example seems far-fetched: How would you coerce manufacturers to give you enough detail about the contents of their products and the production methods? It seems that any boycott-based group with standards significantly higher than the status quo would starve before it could get enough economic power to influence the mega-corporations they are trying to regulate.

It's an idea I really wish could work, but it commits the #1 libertarian fallacy of assuming that markets are free enough to be called capitalist.

[nazgulnarsil]

how do you think organic food started? people decided that the FDA's labels for what is and is not acceptable was too granular so they created their own certification based on their own values.

I would argue that government regulation lowers quality in general because it creates an overhead for any competing entity. Consider if the government created a "free milk" program and payed for it with taxes. Instead of suppliers competing for the many quality levels that consumers are interested in the vast majority now only cater to one quality level: that set by regulation. What is easier to game? one customer (the regulator) or millions of competing customers?

[jellicle]

And until the government came and regulated the word, anyone could describe anything, no matter how produced, as "organic".

And now that there is in fact a government regulation, one cannot.

http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/nop

> What is easier to game? one customer (the regulator) or millions of competing customers?

I'm not sure what you're asking here. It's quite clear to me that one regulatory body, which can hire inspectors and food-testers and use economies of scale to regulate an entire industry, is much less easy to fool than individuals purchasing milk, who cannot cost-effectively hire inspectors and food-testers and thus cannot evaluate the quality of the product AT ALL.

[nazgulnarsil]

and another standard will soon arise because the same people who wanted to pay a premium for higher quality food are complaining that now that organic has been regulated the quality has decreased drastically. producers are gaming the rules.

[wtallis]

Organic food production is regulated by the US government in part due to lobbying from commercial certifying agencies. Organic food's benefits to the consumer are also mostly imaginary. How does that make it a good example of successful non-governmental regulation?

Your "free milk program" example is far more than government regulation, so I'm not really sure why it belongs in this discussion. It seems to be a badly-executed straw-man argument.

[nazgulnarsil]

so you get to dictate whether people spend their money on organic food. nice.

[stretchwithme]

Any such group is simply a niche market and one that would be more clearly defined and quantified than most, assuming its ever allowed to exist at all. All kinds of companies target niches all the time.

You say this idea assumes markets are free enough to be called capitalist? How does it do that exactly?

[wtallis]

If the regulation from below imposes standards that are actually restricting for the big players in the market, they can simply ignore the consumers' wishes unless the barriers to entry and scaling up in that market are sufficiently low that the interested consumers are able to organize their own supplier to meet their demand. Clearly, this is not going to be a feasible method for regulating internet backbones, because it's far, far too expensive to set up your own tier 2 network with only grassroots funding.