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by notahacker
28 days ago
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> 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. LMAO. Perhaps leave lecturing what transport looks like in the absence of regulation to people who've actually seen what transport looks like in the absence of any effective regulation (hint: the public does not rely on independent safety reports or indeed have access to much accident reporting at all, the transport is usually [over]full, and yes it kills a lot more people than commercial aircraft, sometimes including people that didn't consent to use the transport). Even specifically within the sphere of aviation there's this not-that-little country called Indonesia whose airlines were banned from operating in the West for a long time because of an extremely well known lack of adequate safety standards, and an accompanying tendency to plunge passengers to a fiery death. It was one of the fastest growing air transport markets in the world. People whose extreme ignorance of transport safety is exceeded only by their overconfidence they'd do a better job than the regulators are of course precisely the people such regulation aims to protect. > You must be joking. They were worldwide news They were worldwide news because of mandatory disclosures and independent safety regulation which in unregulated transport environments simply do not exist. If these did not exist, you would have no reason to assume that aircraft crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia have any bearing on the safety of your flight in the USA. (You're evidently not aware of the other six serious crashes involving Lion Air, the operator of the first Boeing 737 Max across its first two decades of operation, and certainly won't have boycotted the aircraft types involved as a result). If you wanted to get a bus or ferry in Indonesia, you wouldn't have the first clue which ones operated to adequate safety standards or not. This is not because Indonesians trust their government; it is because the libertarian fantasy of independent third parties seamlessly filling in the knowledge gaps is not a reality. Take it from someone that actually spent the first part of their career working for a company that collected data on the aviation sector... |
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So why is that? Because Indonesians don't value human life the way people in the US do? Maybe that's true. Maybe there's a much wider variation in the world as far as how humans value human life, than we Westerners assume. And if that's the case, then maybe Indonesia's unsafe airlines are fine for Indonesians. But that doesn't mean that the same sort of thing would happen in the US if people in the US understood that government regulation could not be relied on to protect them from unsafe airplanes.
Or do Indonesians want safer airplanes, but can't get them? Why not? And if they want safer airplanes but can't get them, why do they fly on the unsafe ones?
> it is because the libertarian fantasy of independent third parties seamlessly filling in the knowledge gaps is not a reality.
Why doesn't this happen in Indonesia? Because the Indonesian government keeps it from happening? Historically that's the reason: governments can't regulate, but also can't allow third parties to provide the information the government can't, because that would undermine their power.