[lurking15]

I think people will hit a breaking point and it will be undeniable that heavy regulation and subsidization is the root of dysfunction and deterioration of most important aspects of life.

It's hard not to see the parallel between healthcare and education where the parasitic overhead has been completely unchecked and enabled by federal subsidies. There's a similar deal with food, housing and other areas. It's absurd the amount of money that has been spent by the federal government in these areas with so little to show, the average person feels not only a lack of progress but decline.

[ses1984]

Much of the regulation you’re saying is to blame was written in blood.

Want to know what food and housing was like before regulation? Read the jungle.

Do you think we have deteriorated since then?

Maybe the prosperity you think has deteriorated was not due to lack of regulation, but due to black swan events like… i dunno conquering and industrializing the entire North American continent, all peer nations blowing each other to bits in two world wars, etc?

[NumberWangMan]

I agree that all regulation is written in blood. But at the same time, regulation can result in bleeding, and we don't always carefully weigh the costs and benefits of regulation. There may be a law that saves 100 lives a year, but that indirectly causes 150 deaths due to knock-on effects.

It's not easy to inject nuance into a discussion that feels like you have millions of people on each side of a tug-of-war rope that goes from "MORE REGULATION" to "LESS REGULATION".

I think housing, which you mention, is an excellent example. Yes, we need regulation in housing because without it, people will die from shoddy structures collapsing on them, electrocution, gas leaks, etc. But at the same time, in the USA there are absolutely regulations in housing with very little benefit and absolutely massive costs, where we have examples of first-world countries without those regulations that do just fine. I'm talking about things like the requirement that all apartments have 2 stairwells. Or mandatory setbacks and minimum lot sizes and parking requirements. edit -- and of course zoning codes, where we've shifted the market toward building housing that's so big that people can only afford to share it with strangers. And while people used to live in crowded, cramped tenements, driving housing prices up by restricting supply leads to people living on the street.

In medicine, there are diminishing marginal returns to making doctors go through more schooling, and the cost is simply that fewer people choose to be doctors, and people just go without health care. And even within that simple dilemma of "should we make it harder or easier to be a doctor", i'm sure there is a universe of alternate ways to move the needle in different dimensions. Requiring more or less schooling, more or less time in residency, changing limits on the number of hours doctors and nurses can be scheduled in a week, tightening or loosening malpractice law in different ways, etc. Each of these has some positive and negative effects, and I'm sure we have a ways to go before we hit the optimal point. And even then, you have to choose how to balance quality of patient care against doctors and nurses quality of life!

Or take drug approvals. There are drugs in development that show lots of promise, that probably should be made available to people who are dying anyway and want to try them. The FDA does not allow that. We have to balance against companies trying to scam people with fake medicine. No policy is 100% without harm. I believe that, even for policies I strongly advocate.

Or laws that were originally targeted at local environmental protection, that are now being used by nearby residents to stop solar farms from being built, stopping us from reducing fossil fuel usage. Those regulations were written in the blood of wildlife -- and now they're cause much more harm than good to wildlife all across the world.

So if you are asking if we've deteriorated since The Jungle, in many ways, no, of course we've improved safety of working conditions massively, and lots of other things. But in other, important ways, we've gone somewhat backwards. I believe it's absolutely possible to improve our society by removing some regulations, but I think it takes a lot of careful, small, targeted tweaks, where we've carefully weighed the costs and benefits. Though in rare cases, like as in parking minimums, the evidence is that they are so harmful that just scrapping the regulation entirely is the way to go.*

[ses1984]

This is a lot more nuanced than your original post.

Your op uses stronger language that makes it sound like all we have to do to solve social problems is deregulate everything.

Is there a parasitic overhead over healthcare? Yes.

Is it “undeniable that heavy regulation and subsidization is the root of dysfunction and deterioration of most important aspects of life”?

And you played the lack of nuance card after writing that…

[lurking15]

> Want to know what food and housing was like before regulation? Read the jungle.

Not convincing since you're reducing the entire time period to The Jungle which was sensationalized fiction, effectively political propaganda.

But to your broader point, things improved directly from capitalism and markets. My reading recommendation? Deirdre McCloskey "Why Liberalism Works" on the absurd increase in living standards brought about through innovation enabled by capitalism, we're talking some 3,000% in average income over the course of time you're referring to.

[ses1984]

Where you have 3000% increase in income do you also have absolutely no regulation?

I don’t think you can just factor out the regulation, assign it none of the credit for how things turned out, and assign all the credit to unchecked capitalism.

Maybe the jungle is sensationalized, what was really happening roughly concurrently: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, homestead steel strike, Pullman strike, tenement housing, etc

If you prefer less dramatized further reading, https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/mono-regsafepar...

I don’t think liberalism doesn’t work. I’m just responding to someone saying it’s “undeniable that heavy regulation and subsidization is the root of dysfunction and deterioration of most important aspects of life”.

Some regulations are bad, either intentionally or unintentionally, but a lot of regulation exists because the prior unregulated state was horrific.

[consteval]

This isn't due to "heavy regulation", it's due to the free market.

Insurance companies have an incentive to make medical care as awful and inefficient as possible. There's a tug-of-war here: doctors want to provide the highest quality care as fast as possible; insurance companies want to provide the least amount of care as rarely as possible.

Well... they're the ones paying.

These doctors are struggling to deal with "regulations" - they're struggling to deal with insurance. The sheer administrative overhead of medical insurance is staggering. You can go ask doctors, any of them will tell you.

[maxerickson]

You don't have to deregulate to move away from demand side subsidies as your main intervention.