[pianoben]

Right! Naturally, our Congress is full of technical and administrative expertise and totally has the time, patience, and will to cleanly and carefully craft the wide body of regulation we've grown to require for a smooth and healthy and productive society. No reason for those awful technocrats to usurp such authority when we've got a capable and knowledgable legislative branch capable of doing the work just as well.

[pdonis]

> the wide body of regulation we've grown to require for a smooth and healthy and productive society.

If you actually believe this is true, I have some sad news for you. Does the term "regulatory capture" mean anything to you?

> those awful technocrats

If you actually believe the "technocrats" have the knowledge required to craft regulations that actually are a net benefit, again, I have some sad news for you.

[MattPalmer1086]

Your solution is?

[pdonis]

There is no magic solution to the "problem" of "how to dictate rules to a large society that will keep things smooth and productive". The problem is fundamentally intractable if you insist on looking at it that way.

There is another option, which is to not dictate rules at all, unless you absolutely have to in order to have a civil society in the first place. For example, we have laws against things like murder and theft and fraud, because you can't have a civil society if those things aren't deterred and punished.

But the vast majority of the laws and regulations we have in place now are not doing that. They're attempts to micromanage from the top something that fundamentally cannot be micromanaged from the top. Nobody has enough knowledge to do that. So we should stop doing it.

[MattPalmer1086]

Giving up is not a strategy. Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity, but not having any at all is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster.

For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).

[pdonis]

> Giving up is not a strategy.

Nor is it what I advocated.

> Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity

That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their markets.

> allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.

Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened?

> Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).

You're assuming that food and water providers would be able to do such things in a "free market". But doing such things is obviously bad for business, so providers would have a strong incentive not to do it in a free market, since in a free market, doing things that are bad for business makes you go out of business.

In our current regulatory environment, however, large corporations can do many things that are bad for business, as long as they can get government regulators to agree to let them. For an example from a few years ago, a major aicraft manufacturer got the FAA to approve a change to one of its oldest aircraft types that ended up killing two airplanes full of people. How? Because the FAA didn't even look at the change: the "regulation" had evolved to the point where the FAA just took the manufacturer's word for it that everything was OK.

In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business. But of course in our current regulatory environment that can't happen, because regulation has forced aircraft manufacturers to amalgamate to the point that neither of the two biggest ones can ever be allowed to go out of business--too many long chains of dominoes, including much of the US's military capability (and not just in airplanes), depend on them.

Tell me again how regulations make things better?

[fc417fc802]

> > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.

> humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years

You really can't compare pre and post industrial revolution like that. Large scale synthesis of toxic chemicals as a byproduct of some unrelated industry just wasn't a thing previously.

> In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business.

Extremely doubtful. Air travel has been intentionally pushed to a ridiculously high level of assurance by regulation. I don't think the free market would have selected for the current cost vs safety balance on its own.

I appreciate where you're coming from, that a large portion of existing regulation is gratuitous, being structured the way it is primarily for the benefit of the incumbent. But that doesn't mean that such regulation isn't doing anything useful at the same time.

[rectang]

The idea that being "bad for business" is a sufficient disincentive to dissuade commercial entities in a free market from harming and killing people is risible.

Even if you eliminated the immunity shield for corporate leadership so they couldn't skate after their company goes bankrupt, there would still be innumerable risk-takers willing to gamble with human lives to make more money.

I expect the argument you want to make is that having people harmed and killed is an acceptable sacrifice for greater economic efficiency, but you're aware that it doesn't play well — especially when the benefits of economic efficiency tend to flow to the people doing the killing rather than the people being killed.

[salawat]

Regulation didn't cause mergers. Non-enforcement of anti-trust law did. M&A's simply should not have been approved over the last few decades the way they were. You're trying to say it was the regulations that were the problem, but it is unironically the size of the regulated compared to manpower of the regulator that was the problem, which becomes a non-issue when you don't keep allowing mergers and acquisitions. Many small redundant competitors is manageable and a veritable incubator for innovation. One massive Leviathan conglomerate is a vehicle for regulatory capture and public abuse. You complain about the FAA, when the true culprit was the FTC approving mergers time after time freeing up capital that'd otherwise have needed to be put to use gaining competitive advantage and innovating for use to muck with the political landscape. Get where you're coming from, but you're blind as to the cure. A regulation could 100% have avoided the MAX situation. That regulation had nothing to do with airplanes, but maintaining a healthy and competitive domestic civil air transport industry, rather than a massively conglomerated one. We know corporate hierarchies attract psychopaths. The aim is to have as many slots at the top so that enough of them can be filled with the non-psychopathic so that society isn't held hostage by a handful of TBTF's all governed by psychopaths. If it is in threat of being TBTF, it should unironically be priority 1 to split, subdivide, and duplicate until redundancy allows part of it to be able to safely fail. Only then can it safely managed.

[robocat]

FYI, poisonous chemicals are allowed in your drinking water.

The current federal limits include:

  Cyanide: 0.2 mg/L

  Uranium: 30 µg/L

  Gross alpha particles: 15 picocuries per liter (pCi/L).  Beta particles and photon emitters: 4 millirem/year dose equivalent

Dosis sola facit venenum https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

[cucumber3732842]

The federal bureaucracy is dictating[1] a lot of minutia on the square centimeter level that should be getting done at the square kilometer level. We could probably give up on a lot of detailed stuff without any negative effect.

Like for example the amount of water a toilet flush can has been federally regulated since the 90s. Sure, that might be important if you need to keep some schmucks in the desert from bickering over aquifer depletion and whatnot. But the majority of jurisdictions in the east "we take surface water and give it back to the same watershed" jurisdictions who can use all the water they want and only impact the required size of the hardware at the treatment plant. So why are we even regulating this? And any issue you look into there's a plethora of stuff like that. Theoretically it's all justifiable in abstract but that's like littering, it doesn't scale.

[1] via "states shall adopt in order to qualify for this grant" type rules which the states then roll downhill

[elevation]

Align congressional incentives with reduction in the size of the US code and regulations.

The current US code, printed as a book, could not be read in five lifetimes of daily 9-5 reading. Make reading the law aloud a requirement of their job -- they're not permitted to stop until they've completed it, except they may sleep at night and they may assemble to vote to remove laws which are no longer needed. Failure to read the laws at the start of their tenure results in being held in federal court for the duration of their time in office.

[ceejayoz]

> Naturally, our Congress is full of technical and administrative expertise…

Congress knew of that issue; for decades, Congress has delegated the nitty gritty to regulatory agencies, who employ said experts.

SCOTUS, on the other hand, are the idiots you seek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...

[mothballed]

Don't worry, we're going to enjoy the fruits of your thought process real well and good -- the very last guy left in the House with any constitutional focus just got blasted out with the most expensive outside funding campaign against a rep in the entire history of the USA. It looks like the bureaucratic state is just getting on its next level roll, so enjoy the ride. A few of you may even realize in the coming years why the 10th amendment wasn't meant to just be an inconvenience to ignore.

But I'm not dumb enough to think you'll believe my words, you'll only learn by experience.

[mindslight]

I've been where you are. In your coming years you will realize that the bureaucracy had at least brought us stability, prosperity, and a modicum of protection against abuse from big business, the rough edges for small businesses and individuals near the edge of the law notwithstanding. Characterizing Massie's loss as an aspect of that bureaucracy is a mistake - Trumpism is a repudiation of the bureaucracy in favor of autocracy, while the all of the authoritarianism sticks around (or even grows!). Expect those rough edges to become much more arbitrary and capricious. And no, accelerationism or "I told you so" won't save you.