Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

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Why should we spend tons of money on regulating every single item? That are cost that have to be payed by somebody.

Also its incredible difficulte to design these standard. Its almost impossible to remove bad ones because the burocracy has a clear interest in having asany as possible.

There is a clear insentive for regulatory capture. If you do it the libertarian way you just have universal courts that are much harder to be captured by interest groupes.

This system is superior to regulation because once you have, you have little ongoing cost. New products don't have built in extra cost as it would in a regulatory system and only if somebody bother to actually sue that person, one would have to spend money.

The money spent on the investigation is largly spend privatly. This means that the investigation is done effectivly, while a burocracy usually has the opposite insentive.

Also,any of the countries you mentioned are some of the most libertarian in the world. Look at the economic freedom index (doing buissness index is part of that).

> only if somebody bother to actually sue that person, one would have to spend money. > The money spent on the investigation is largly spend privately.

This is why hardline libertarianism needs to revisit history and check with reality. Hundreds, thousands or millions of people shouldn't be injured or die before someone with enough money / evidence can sue or a class action lawsuit is brought before a court. Thousands of people shouldn't become addicted to or overdose from their laudanum infused snake oil. Children shouldn't have to die because their food, medicine or toys have easily prevented, harmful or deadly flaws. That was the norm before the FDA. People have a history of harming others for their own gain. Gone unchecked, it will happen regularly because the market will allow it. That is why we have regulatory agencies: we cannot rely on the market forces for absolutely everything.

Actually back before that FDA that was true because people were generally poor and could not buy quality. Evidence quite clearly shows that with growing wealth you also get improved quality. Product quality was rising steadily in the US way before the FDA, and when the FDA came along it did not radically improve, it continued on much the same path as before. Correlation is not Causation.

> That is why we have regulatory agencies: we cannot rely on the market forces for absolutely everything.

We have regulatory agencies because somebody thought regulatory agencies were a good idea. That something exits, is not prove that it works. Its not like these agencies get closed when they are doing a bad job.

Generally these bureaucracies just keep growing and attempting to ever increase the amount of detailed regulation in order to justify higher budget.

This is basic, well documented and tested political economy.

> This is why hardline libertarianism needs to revisit history and check with reality. Hundreds, thousands or millions of people shouldn't be injured or die before someone with enough money / evidence can sue or a class action lawsuit is brought before a court.

I have argued in other posts that the legal system is what is most important. In the case of the US the class action lawsuit has lots of problems, legal scholars and legal historians have designed and found much better ways of doing it.

Also, lets not ignore the millions of people who did because of the FDA. They have (actually had) a long history of waiting a long time to let dying people have medicine. In some cases they band useful medicine.

There is a hole history of such things that is often ignored.

We already have these problems... The current system, and more socialized/communist systems aren't working any better.

When any of that happens it's a nationwide scandal and huge recalls are in order. That alone should tell you the system works quite well at making those situations very rare. Imagine what would happen without it.

That's simply a assertion. Recall cost a lot of money, companies have every intensive to avoid them. Just saying that everything happens because of regulation simply does not hold up as a argument if their are other or better explanations.

Oh, like this national scandal regarding Aloe Vera that probably won't be on any major news network TV station, and there aren't any recalls happening?

Aloe vera based cosmetic products aren't regulated. Per the article, Bloomberg had the products analyzed independently and are reporting on the findings. It is unknown for how long this has been the case and, before this article, what the exact composition for each product was despite their labels.

This is pretty much the libertarian solution: let the market handle it, maybe someone with the means to will care enough to look into it. Millions of people applied a mystery gel to their skin, some in an attempt to treat an ailment, for what could be years or decades.

There could still be truth in advertisement and labelling requirements that take civil suit for a court to award and fine, then gov't action if they don't comply with court rulings. This wouldn't take a bunch of specific legislation, committees or investigation teams from the govt.

Difficult to design a standard?

Here's a good start: If your product doesn't contain enough of X, you can't call yourself X.

That's why ice cream that is not real ice cream is called 'frozen dairy dessert' and cheese that's not cheese is a 'cheese product'.

I'm not for regulating all the products, but I'm also not going to carry a MRI scanner around and determine exactly what is what.

A extremely generalisiere law like that is exactly what you would get out of a common law approach. If somebody sued somebody else about something the judge makes a judgment call about it, establishing a quasi standard. This quasi standard can then be revisited if needed.

The system that actually exists and many people here want is that every new product has to go threw a state facility that does testing and finds errors. Such a system actually exists and performs badly.

If a system of law is in action you can trust what you buy because you have trust that mass products are at least up to a minimum of standard. Sure, such a system probably does not find every detail. No system is perfect, a law based approach is generalized and low cost.

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