[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.

[pdonis]

> I don't think the free market would have selected for the current cost vs safety balance on its own.

Possibly not. Possibly in a free market people still would fly on an aircraft type that was known to have had two recent crashes that killed everyone on board. I wouldn't, but perhaps I'm an outlier.

But if people would be willing to fly on such an aircraft in a free market (which means that the value of flying on it, to them, is greater than the cost, even including the expected cost of the risk of a fatal crash), then the logical consequence is not that our air travel regulations are doing good; it's that our air travel regulations are overestimating (possibly drastically) the value we actually put on human life, and therefore are diverting large amounts of resources to things that actually are worth less to us than they cost. That's not a net benefit.

[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.

[pdonis]

Don't put words in my mouth. I have never said that people being harmed and killed is acceptable. My disagreement is about whether government regulations, on net, actually result in fewer people being harmed and killed, or more. That's a factual disagreement, not a disagreement about values. If I believed, factually, that government regulations actually did result in fewer people being harmed, on net, I would be in favor of them, no matter what libertarian beliefs I might have in the abstract. But my factual belief is the opposite.

To the extent it's true that being "bad for business" is no longer enough of a disincentive for corporations, as I've already said, one key reason is that the corporations have bought regulations that favor them and disfavor potential competitors.

It's true that that's not the only factor involved. Corporate governance is broken. A big part of that is also government regulation, which does to some extent prevent outright fraud (for example, the S&L debacle in the 1980s), but is perfectly fine with other practices, like golden parachutes for executives and corporate takeovers in which the buyer gets the assets but offloads the liabilities on the taxpayers, that do just as much damage, if not more. All of these things are regulated--but the regulations don't stop harm from being done.

There is one other factor that works against corporate governance which is not, in itself, a product of government regulation: the fact that most share ownership now is not individual stockholders but mutual funds. That means most people don't even know what corporations they own even small pieces of. But mutual funds are a big advantage for most people investing for their retirement, because they're an obvious hedge against risk, so they would exist even in a true free market without any government regulation. The problem is that, as far as the individual corporations are concerned, their time horizon is now much shorter. The mutual fund has to care about providing returns over a long time horizon, because it's holding people's retirement accounts, which might not be drawn on for decades. But the corporations only see short term trades being made, many of them by those same mutual funds, trying to increase their returns. So corporations have to focus much more on short term returns instead of long term planning.

That would be one area where a government ought to be able to improve things, because a government's time horizon ought to be long-term. But it isn't. Government's time horizon is the next election. So even in this area, governments are actually worse than corporations.

[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.