[lobster_johnson]

Surely the thing to advocate is less gratuitous regulation and more efficiency. Because no regulation at all is disastrous — without it we would still be living with lead paint, arsenic in our food, rat-filled restaurant kitchens and so on. Libertarianism espouses minimal state intervention, but it's clear that we actually do need a lot of intervention. At the same time it needs to be the good, useful type of intervention that protects citizens against the abuses of the marketplace.

[smsm42]

You don't need an special "regulation" to not put arsenic into anybody's food. Arsenic is poison, and poisoning one's food is attempted murder. Laws against murder existed well before Iron Age, so there's no need for lawmakers to sweat too much about how to regulate such thing.

If you go to a restaurants where only thing that is preventing them from being rat-infested is government I suggest changing you patronage to a better place. Your home, I suppose, is not rat-infested, yet how often the government checks it? Somehow you manage to keep rats out of your home without the government, don't you? Why do you think everybody else can't do the same? Are they, unlike you, lack some important parts in their brains that allow them to function independently? I doubt it.

>>> At the same time it needs to be the good, useful type of intervention that protects citizens against the abuses of the marketplace.

Marketplace is by definition a voluntary interaction, and participants in voluntary interaction can claim abuse only in one case - when one of the parties were fraudulent and did not deliver their end of the bargain. In this case, indeed, the government needs to step in and enforce the deal - or provide some other satisfactory resolution. But that's not what current law code is doing, it is very far from it. It actually tries to mold the marketplace into the shape and form that politicians prefer, and that's where most of the abuses come from.

[lobster_johnson]

> Arsenic is poison, and poisoning one's food is attempted murder.

This is a very naive view. Pretty much everything is poisonous at high enough dosages, but there are plenty of poisonous chemicals that are not immediately harmful at low levels.

You can have a restaurant, a food manufacturer, a water utility etc. contaminate (intentionally or otherwise) their product with low doses of chemicals that over time will cause health issues or even fatalities.

The marketplace itself cannot regulate such abuses. Even if such contamination was punishable by law, the time lag would ensure that consumers would not realize the impact until long after, perhaps even after the statute of limitations has expired.

Just look at third-world countries to see how the lack of regulation works out. Or China.

> ... I suggest changing you patronage to a better place.

I don't know whether my restaurant has rats in the kitchen. How could I? The entire point of health inspections is to find out what the consumer cannot possibly find out themselves.

> Why do you think everybody else can't do the same?

Trendy, swanky restaurants are routinely shut down for doing very bad things behind the scenes. So clearly they can't.

Companies don't work for you; they work for themselves. If they have no incentive to be good, they usually won't be good; because, say, it's less expensive to be highly hygienic. You just have to look at the literature of consumer abuses to see how companies will continually, eternally act for their own good, at the detriment of consumers.

[smsm42]

I don't understand, what's "naive" here? You say something may be poisonous, even at low doses. Poisoning people is a crime. I don't even see the question here.

>>> I don't know whether my restaurant has rats in the kitchen. How could I?

Ever heard of reviews? Critics? Certifications? Yelp? Zagat? Michelin stars? It is fascinating that a grown adult obviously having access to the internet, in 2013, can sincerely claim he doesn't know how to figure out if a restaurant is any good. There's a huge industry built on doing just that. People are complaining they have to many apps on their phone to do that and get confused.

>>>> Trendy, swanky restaurants are routinely shut down for doing very bad things behind the scenes. So clearly they can't.

Successful, prominent politicians are regularly busted for infidelity. So, clearly, spousal fidelity needs government regulation.

[atombender]

You are missing the time component. Reviews don't matter if the effects take a decade to show themselves.

> Ever heard of reviews?

You missed my point: Transparency. A restaurant may get rave reviews and still have a filthy, dangerous kitchen. It's what we, as consumers, don't have access to that matters.

> So, clearly, spousal fidelity needs government regulation.

This is a ridiculous non sequitur. I was arguing that companies obviously could not self-police, since they are doing bad things all the time even with state policing; how is your reply relevant?

[smsm42]

Companies can't self-police. But other people - that care about what companies do - can find out what they do. Just as politician's affairs are found out, for example. So your claim that government coercion is necessary to either find out the information or disseminate it is obviously false - there are existing systems for doing both, and they work quire well - at least, not worse than government ones - where they are applied.

[lobster_johnson]

First of all, in many cases this requires that such entities have interior access. If you can't inspect facilities but only the end product, you become very limited in what you can do.

Secondly, even then, all you can do is disseminate information. You can't enforce anything; you can only try to convince people to vote with their feet.