[kerkeslager]

> If this practice is so bad, why is it allowed for all other industries?

Competent lawmakers consider enforceability. Enforcing a law like this requires either the creation and funding of an enforcement agency, or additional funding to an existing agency to enforce it. If your law applies to all industries, that funding is massive and gets struck down--either the law simply isn't passed, or the law is passed but is a totally ineffective political gesture. There are rare exceptions, where there's political will to actually put together that funding (for example: ObamaCare), but then you run into the complexity of how such a law interplays with the various industries and parties impacted, and getting the enforcement of such a law right takes decades of tweaking and handling edge cases, which may never actually work.

Long story short, I'd much rather see small laws that target small, well-understood problems and fix them, than see unenforceable feel-good political gestures or some politician's magnum opus for his legacy that tries to do something too complicated for anyone to understand.

[fallingknife]

That's nonsense. You don't need any additional bureaucracy. That's just an excuse that bureaucrats use to justify their worthless existence. Do we need new courts and judges every time something new is made illegal?

[kerkeslager]

> Do we need new courts and judges every time something new is made illegal?

That's not what I was talking about.

If you make a law saying that quotas have to be communicated to employees so they can know what they're working up to, then you need someone to physically go to the workplaces and make sure that quotas are being communicated. It's as simple as that.

If you are enforcing this in, say, 500 warehouses, one person can probably do all the inspections, as that's a little less than two locations per day to go to all the locations in a year.

If you're enforcing this in every workplace in a state the size of California, the inspection apparatus necessary becomes unwieldy, and likely doesn't happen, making the law unenforced and ineffective.

As an aside, while this isn't what I was talking about, creating new laws does in fact mean you need more courts and judges. I'm not sure how you think this could not be the case--do you think you can just add more cases and the same number of workers will simply work more to absorb the additional workload? Keep in mind that most courts in the US have massive case backlogs, and create incentives to settle out of court to avoid court time, which results in all sorts of problems such as dangerous criminals getting away with slaps on the wrist on the one hand, and non-violent offenders being pressured into dangerous CI situations to avoid jail time on the other hand.

[fallingknife]

Or you could be smart and do no inspections at all and say whoever reports it gets 20% of the fine.

[kerkeslager]

Sure, and then hire someone to handle all the reports from people who don't understand the rule, while real reports are inhibited by warehouse owner propaganda such as "your reports won't be confidential" or "a 20% cut of this fine won't cover your lost career" and the more basic fact that almost nobody will know your law exists unless you launch a publicity campaign.

Fiddling economic knobs to try to indirectly get the invisible hand to do what you can do is a terrible enforcement strategy.