[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.

[notahacker]

Some people are willing to be drive drunk. This doesn't mean that taking into account the views of people who don't want to be killed by drunk people when determining who gets to use the roads is "overestimating the value we actually put on human life"

(also, without the safety reporting infrastructure and mandatory disclosures the average person would have absolutely no ability to learn whether the crashes said anything about the safety of the aircraft as a whole. You'd have never known about the 737 Max crashes otherwise, just like if you've ever flown before you evidently didn't know about the last couple of crashes that aircraft type had that killed everyone on board...)

[pdonis]

> Some people are willing to be drive drunk.

In addition to all the other things I pointed out, there's a very simple and obvious difference between this and the airplane case: a person choosing to drive drunk imposes some risk on everyone else who uses the same road they do. But a person choosing to fly on an unsafe airplane imposes no risk on anyone but themselves; their choice doesn't force anyone else to fly on the same airplane.

[pdonis]

> Some people are willing to be drive drunk. This doesn't mean that taking into account the views of people who don't want to be killed by drunk people when determining who gets to use the roads is "overestimating the value we actually put on human life"

You're assuming there is just one such value. There isn't. People who are willing to drive drunk put less value on human life than people who aren't. We deal with that by penalizing people for driving drunk, to give them another incentive not to do it. And, as you say, we do that because people who drive drunk are doing it on the same roads as everyone else, and many if not most people have to use the roads as part of their daily lives, and they value their lives more than the people who choose to drive drunk do.

Also, the person who drives drunk bears risk--they can get injured or killed themselves. They can control that risk

Air travel is not like that. Most people do not have to travel by air as part of their daily lives. Plus, the people who design, build, and maintain the airplanes are not the ones who bear the risks of a crash: the crews and passengers do. So the incentives involved are different.

But there's another aspect to this as well. An airline is not going to operate an airplane unless they can sell enough seats to make it profitable, and not just for one flight, for the expected lifetime of the airplane. So we're not talking about one person choosing to drive drunk. We're talking about enough people choosing to fly on an airplane type that's known to have had fatal crashes due to a design flaw, for a long enough time to make it profitable for an airline to operate that airplane. That is the hypothetical I was responding to, and in that hypothetical, you can't make the kind of argument you're making, that it's a small minority of obvious outliers who are making what you consider to be the "bad" choice.

And it wasn't my hypothetical, I was just responding to it. I actually don't agree with its premise: I don't think that in a free market enough people would choose to fly on such an airplane to make it profitable for an airline to operate it. And at least one reason why I believe that is the differences between that hypothetical scenario, and the current reality of some people choosing to drive drunk, which I've just described.

> without the safety reporting infrastructure and mandatory disclosures the average person would have absolutely no ability to learn whether the crashes said anything about the safety of the aircraft as a whole

Straw man. In a free market where people knew they could not depend on the government to "regulate" (and, as I've pointed out, it didn't in this case), people would refuse to fly on airplanes whose safety records were not well-documented and attested public knowledge. To do otherwise would be obviously foolish. The only reason people don't seek out more such information now is that they believe the government has their back so they don't have to. And that belief, as we've seen, is not justified. In a free market, indeed, a safety reporting infrastructure not very different from what we have now would be expected to evolve--but because it was not run by a government and could not take advantage of the free pass the government gets to skimp on regulations, it would have to build and maintain a justified track record of accuracy.

> You'd have never known about the 737 Max crashes otherwise

You must be joking. They were worldwide news. We didn't need government safety reporting to tell us that two 737 Max aircraft crashed killing everyone on board. Which all by itself would make any sane person not want to fly on a 737 Max aircraft until they understood what had happened and were convinced the root cause had been fixed.

Indeed, the safety reporting system, if anything, contributed to facilitating the crashes--by not bringing to light the many instances of reports by pilots of US flag air carriers about odd behavior of 737 Max aircraft in exactly the same conditions that led to the two crashes. The existence of those reports only came to light, as far as the public was concerned, after the fact, when it was too late.

[fc417fc802]

I agree entirely with the sibling comment. Put another way, just because the layman majority would accept something under a given set of conditions that doesn't make it right or ideal or something to strive for.

Even given the current environment Boeing still tried to (unsuccessfully) shift blame away from themselves. Imagine how that might have gone differently in a "free market" where "unencumbered" by regulation there wasn't even proper investigation or disclosure.

More generally, you seem to be approaching this with the a priori assumption that whatever the free market would arrive at is the correct result. Given that we're considering the merits of various regulations it seem to me that begs the question.

[pdonis]

> a "free market" where "unencumbered" by regulation there wasn't even proper investigation or disclosure.

Straw man. As I pointed out in another post upthread, in a free market, nobody would fly on Boeing aircraft (or anyone's aircraft) if they did not have a well documented and attested safety record, and independent parties would be in the business of documenting and attesting to such things. And since those independent parties would not be able to get the free pass the government gets to skimp on regulations as they did with Boeing, they would have to build and maintain a track record of accuracy.

The only reason people don't seek out such information independently now is that they believe the government has their back so they don't need to. Which, of course, is an unjustified belief.

> you seem to be approaching this with the a priori assumption that whatever the free market would arrive at is the correct result.

I have made no such assumption. There is no single "correct result", and people like me who favor free markets don't do so because we think they can produce any such thing. We favor free markets not because we think they are perfect, but because the alternatives are even worse.

The history of government regulation bears this out. Sure, when everything is going nicely, regulation looks good, and it's easy to talk about how a "free market" (which actually just means "if this particular regulation were to suddenly go away without anything else changing", which is a straw man) would be worse.

But the failure modes of government regulation are worse than those of a free market. The failure mode of a free market is that transactions that could create value don't happen--people don't fly because they can't get reliable information about aircraft safety, for example, so airlines go out of business and a lot of potentially valuable things can't happen because they would need air travel as an enabler. The failure mode of government regulation, as we've seen, is that people are killed out of the blue because the government they thought was protecting them, wasn't.

[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.

[Hikikomori]

This argument is on the level of anti vaxxers questioning vaccines when they dont see those diseases anymore. One can only make such an argument by being offensively ignorant of history.

[pdonis]

> This argument is on the level of anti vaxxers questioning vaccines when they dont see those diseases anymore.

I have no idea where you're getting this from; the argument I'm making is nothing at all like this. Indeed, I have pointed out many bad things that still exist even in the presence of massive government regulation, and are not stopped by such regulation even though they are exactly the kinds of things the regulation was supposed to stop. That is the opposite of what you are claiming my argument is.

> One can only make such an argument by being offensively ignorant of history.

I pointed out elsewhere in the thread who I think is ignorant of history, and it isn't me.

[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