[traviswt]

No. The regulations aren't in place to protect consumers, they're in place to make it prohibitively expensive for anyone to compete. They're lobbied into existence by the market incumbents to stifle competition.

Regulations favor the established.

[consumer451]

> Regulations favor the established.

The current regulations favor the established. In a society that is not entirely regulatory captured, where money does not equal political speech as much, regulations could favor independent family farmers.

I am writing this from the middle of EU farm country, and one of the things that regulations/policies do here is prevent multi-national corporations from buying family farms. The argument against this policy is that family farms are economically inefficient. I will take that trade-off every single day.

Livestock welfare regs in the EU did end up favoring corporations in recent years, to some extent. But, at least in my area, family crop farms will be protected by regulations for the foreseeable future.

[traviswt]

> The _current_ regulations favor the established.

Which is why de-regulation is the answer in this case. If a regulation is bad, roll it back, don't put another layer of complexity on top. Complexity, again, favors the incumbents. They have more resources to deal with all the nuances.

[kerkeslager]

Could you go into what regulations you think are wrong? I am by no means an expert on the topic, but I'm under the impression that meat packing regulations exist because the meat packing industry was causing massive harm to workers, consumers, the environment, etc. I mean, high schoolers read The Jungle for a reason.

One thing that has changed in the past few years is that programs to help local farmers get organic certifications has made organic certification much more accessible to local farmers. Could there be similar programs to help smaller meat packers comply with regulation?

I'm not saying you are wrong, but there are a lot more people on Hacker News who are just against all regulation, than there are people who actually know why specific regulations exist and are against them for informed reasons.