Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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What we arguably need is more "stupid" (as in "keep it simple, stupid") regulation

Double right on. Needless complexity is probably the number one enemy of technology projects, consumer protections, market regulation, and good governance. Everybody at heart is a freaking architecture astronaut, and it's doing us no good at all.

As an example of how things might work, government certainly has a role in defining products in a complex market; otherwise consumers would be at the whim of anybody who could make a good sales pitch. In the airline industry, I buy a ticket to go from point A to point B at a certain time. You can do a lot of hand-waving about how "normal" tickets don't guarantee any of this and how a more nuanced pricing system can allow all the seats to be filled, but that's bullshit. You can accomplish the same thing by simply having a two-tiered system: tickets that get you somewhere at a certain time, and ad-hoc tickets. Add one rule, say ad-hoc tickets can only be purchased in the 48-hours prior to a flight leaving, and you've got all the features of our modern system without all the crap that goes along with it.

I think everybody means well, it's just that there are a ton of people in any regulatory system that can stop or slow-down things, yet they have absolutely no feedback mechanism in place at all to tell them whether what they're doing is actually helping rather than hurting. It's the same exact thing as we technologists see when we work in large organizations with byzantine structures that get in the way of progress and make no sense to anybody.

Did you really just "Double right on" the need for smart regulation and then proceed to armchair quarterback your way to another useless regulation?

Look, we don't have a problem with overbooking in this country (USA). I saw a chart with numbers of how many voluntary and involuntary losses of seats there were on each airline. Even if you add everything together for all the airlines, for the whole year, it's like 10,000. And a huge percentage of those are voluntary rebookings.

Do you know how many people fly every day?

You've just introduced an idea for yet another regulation to fix a nonexistent problem that will screw up the airlines pricing strategy and most likely raise ticket prices for everyone.

Just let the market sort it out, and it appears it already has. Most of the airlines have already revised their rebooking procedure.

We. Don't. Need. More. Regulation. Smart or not.

This is exactly the problem. Everybody wants smart regulation, and everybody thinks they are the smart ones.

I came back to delete my post, but I think I'll leave it up. You make good points.

My point was 1) the government has a role in product definition moreso than regulation, and that one regulation might do the work of 10,000 other ones.

I'll stand by that, but congrats on calling me out. If I were suggesting an _additional_ regulation, you would have nailed it.

But I was not. I was suggesting replacing about 5,000 pages with two sentences. Different thing entirely. I liked and sympathized with the rant, though.

Be careful you don't accidentally sound like the guy the OP was talking about: the person who just wants to tear it all down with some kind of blind faith that no structure at all is needed. Ever since the first markets were set up, there has been structure, provided for either by the traders or some external party. Product definition allows the maximum amount of freedom with the fewest rules. People can trade any way they want, but they deserve a simple and clear label for the thing they're trading -- which is not the current situation. I'd argue 99.9% of the people flying have no idea at all of the trade they made when they gave up their money for a ride somewhere. That complexity and obfuscation is an even bigger enemy than overregulation.

ADD: If I don't know what the hell I'm doing when I participate in a market, how could you possibly argue that regulations were either good or bad? They're impenetrable. No matter what side you come down on politically, that's way fucked up.

I'm sorry, i'm just laughing.

I appreciate your response, and I'm struggling to take it seriously, but I think you just admonished me for being one of those knee-jerk deregulationists while in the same breath suggesting that you can replace 5000 pages of regulation with two sentences.

I'll do my best to add a serious comment though:

The government has no business defining products. The government doesn't know what the market wants or what companies can offer, and it has no idea what the appropriate supply and demand curves look like or what features people value or not.

Again, we just witnessed a situation in which an unregulated part of the market bit United in the ass and cost them a few million dollars, and now are they are rushing to fix it, along with all of the other airlines. No intervention from the government was needed, and now the problem no longer exists. I don't understand why you think the government stepping in and "defining" a product is going to help.

There are many reasons why, but I'll just pull one out of my head: Governments have no idea what's coming. Any regulations or definitions for service unavoidably make it harder for new entrants to offer unique services and products.

Maybe one of the airlines wants to move to your two-tiered system. If the government mandates it, then we have one choice, whether it is the best or not.

I struggle to lay out my argument any more clearly, but I feel like you still, deep down, believe that the government has this secret cabal of smart people who are going to step in and, for example, sensibly define all of our products for us. Who are these people?

/edit In the spirit of trying to agree on something, I will agree that regulations are too complex across the board. It's one of my personal causes. That said, calling for "smarter" regulation is not going to help.

Ok, I give up.

I ventured into this to try to show my fellow libertarians that most times we are our own worst enemy. We can find common ground and make progress without having to break out Hayek every five minutes. I still believe that, but I've had enough for one day.

"...I feel like you still, deep down, believe that the government has this secret cabal of smart people who are going to step in and, for example, sensibly define all of our products for us...."

No. I do not. I believe in consent of the governed, and making progress through reaching agreement on items that both sides can accept. That's it. Thanks for the chat.

What's weird to me is you seem to keep trying to play this off as you being the reasonable one here, as if i'm being frustratingly obtuse.

Frankly, I don't understand what your argument is, because "I believe in consent of the governed, and making progress through reaching agreement on items that both sides can accept" doesn't mean anything.

I mean, consent of the governed usually means representative democracy, which is what we have. So, if that's what you're for, then all the regulations we have are perfectly reasonably determined. If that's not what you mean, I don't know what you mean. How would the system specifically change to be more "consent of the governed"?

We also have a system where we "reach agreement on items that both sides can accept". That's the problem with regulatory capture. We have lobbyists on one side and politicians on the other, and they both agree on things and then we get regulations. Ostensibly, politicians are acting on behalf of their constituents. If they are not, then you have a problem with our structure of government, not the regulatory system.

So far, your only concrete suggestion is that we replace 5000 lines of regulations with two sentences of regulation, which I've already explained why I think is a bad idea. Everything else you said is just feel good words that could mean anything to anyone.

You also seem to be assuming what my position is. My position is that in order to justify a regulation, we have to find a true and significant market failure. In such case, the first option should be investigating ways that the market failure could be addressed without regulation. And before a regulation is promulgated, we should require a cost-benefit analysis that results in the calculation that the regulation will create more benefit for society than it costs.

Your regulation suggestion would fail both of my tests. First, because the problem you're trying to fix is already fixed. Second because your proposed solution would cost much more than we are actually paying in inconvenience right now.

I have a lot of experience working in complex systems, and I have some government experience, and I know that systems are always much more complex than we think they are. I have an extreme amount of modesty toward thinking that I can introduce easy solutions to problems in complex systems. Government workers, most of the time are ill-equipped to step into a market and make it better.

10,000 people suffer for what net gain though? If we say the refund must be 20,000$ plus 5x the ticket price airlines will still optimize and be profitable, but they are going to hesitate to regularly break their contracts 30+ times a day.

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