[pdonis]

> 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.

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.

[notahacker]

Maybe it's just because the libertarian fantasy that if the government doesn't regulate something the private sector will do a much better job is slightly less plausible and well evidenced than the average story involving wizards and magic.

Honestly, if you're so naive about how the adult world works that you think the most likely reason why unconnected third parties don't get access to all the information required to properly audit an airline's safety practices (even if they've somehow found a B2C business model to conduct such audits) is that the government stops them, you're precisely the sort of uworldly person such regulation is intended to protect. Well, you and the people that don't trust in unregulated airlines but run the risk of being hit by their aircraft anyway....

[pdonis]

> the libertarian fantasy that if the government doesn't regulate something the private sector will do a much better job

I have never claimed "much better". But given the overall track record of government regulation in actually protecting people from the harmful things it's supposed to protect them from, it would be hard for any private effort to do worse. If you disagree with that, evidently we don't live on the same planet and there's not enough common ground between us for a useful discussion.

That said, perhaps it might help if I rephrase things somewhat. I'm accepting, at least for the sake of argument, your claim that, for example, Indonesians have no way of getting any reliable information about which buses, ferries, etc. are safe (and that the same was true of airplanes for many years, but perhaps that's changing now).

And that makes me wonder: why do people even use these things, if they have no information about their safety? Or why don't they find some way of getting the information? Why can't someone start a business that provides it? Would people just not pay for it because they think such information should be free? What's the mindset here? Am I really that much of an outlier, that it seems obviously foolish to me to be using these things if you have no way of getting reliable information about their safety? Is Indonesia, for example, really full of such "unworldly" people who need to be protected from their own unworldliness?

You call such ideas as starting a business to provide people with such information a "libertarian fantasy". To me the fantasy is the idea that government regulation can be depended on to "protect" the "unworldly" people who otherwise will happily do unsafe things. As I said above, the overall track record of government regulation gives no basis for any such belief.

> you're precisely the sort of uworldly person such regulation is intended to protect

I don't know where you're getting this from, since I've already said elsewhere in this thread that I personally would not fly on an airplane whose safety record I have no reliable information about. It's quite true that my current best source of such information is the US government. But that doesn't mean that situation is the best that can be done.

> the people that don't trust in unregulated airlines but run the risk of being hit by their aircraft anyway

I don't know what you mean by this.

[notahacker]

> But given the overall track record of government regulation in actually protecting people from the harmful things it's supposed to protect them from, it would be hard for any private effort to do worse. If you disagree with that, evidently we don't live on the same planet and there's not enough common ground between us for a useful discussion.

Yes, evidently we don't. On the one hand, I live in a world in which regulation has ensured that a thin aluminium tube fuel of highly flammable fuel which takes off and lands at several hundred mph and is the paradigm example of "how metal fatigue causes things to break in unexpected ways" on engineering courses is actually the safest form of transport by some margin, with aviation safety records being strongly correlated with levels of regulation. On the other hand you think the Wild West and Somalia represent safety models it should move towards.

Honestly, if you have so little grasp of how the world of business works that you think the biggest obstacle to some random third party conducting an audit of an airline's operations, maintenance and safety practices to share with consumers is the government (you honestly can't grasp that the airline needs to cooperate and almost certainly doesn't want to?!?!) maybe it's for the best we don't take your advice on how to improve the industry...

> I don't know what you mean by this.

I can see how the concept that unregulated airlines' planes can crash into people who didn't choose to fly with them is very difficult to understand if you are either four years old or four comments deep into insisting that poorly maintained aircraft crashing isn't a problem because the people on the plane made rational and informed choices to be there