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> You see the benefits of regulation but not the costs

In my defense, I plainly asked about the outcomes and the costs. My point is that we need serious information, not more speculation.

The parent comment omits the costs of a lack of regulation, such as sickness for diners, spread of disease, injury for workers, etc. But the question is not can we speculatively come up with costs and benefits, but how much do these things actually cost and benefit us?

> This has been abundantly studied, contrary to your post

I didn't say that. I said there is no well-known information. Could you point to some?

> govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value

I don't agree at all. In fact, government performs much that helps business produce value. Look at the benefits from NASA, medical research, scientific research (Albert Einstein wasn't a private entrepreneur) ... fracking, IIRC, is the product of government research, as is much of the energy industry ... the entire foundation of the Internet and web is mostly from government institutions (ARPA, CERN, U of Illinois, and many more). And for much of the period of the West's greatest growth, the 1950s and 1960s, government ran businesses, and regulated and taxed at rates that seem astronomical today.

Government also provides (produces) systems of laws, regulations, roads, security, education, health, and other things that are absolutely necessary for and greatly enhance business. Without education and health, who would be working for the businesses and buying their goods? Without roads, how would they ship? Without law and regulation, who would feel safe buying from them and how would disputes be resolved? Without the military, how would international shipping lanes supply all those goods?

You speak in broad generalizations that miss many points and make many faulty assumptions. One example:

> govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value

Governments can offer loans for small business, or work with banks to provide security to banks so that banks can issues loans to small business even though this might not be as lucrative as only focusing on large business.

Governments provide grants for research or results for research directly. Nasa has ton of stuff than just be used directly. There are also programs were an inventor can get money to do research and invent things. There are also government grants for research institutions that do research.

> but you also have abundant choice of street food

Without those government inspectors good luck knowing if that vendor that showed up yesterday is actually serving chicken and not something that tastes like chicken. Also good luck having that meal without a side of cholera. Being healthy enough to work is might not be a government service, but a good government certainly encourages it.

> You speak in broad generalizations that miss many points and make many faulty assumptions.

Absolutely. Let's be specific.

> Without those government inspectors good luck knowing if that vendor that showed up yesterday is actually serving chicken and not something that tastes like chicken.

That assumes everyone cares if the cheap tasty food is actually chicken. It also has the assumption that without the government, there would be a dangerous outbreak of cholera.

With regulation, we need to talk about specific instances, and what the positive and negative effects of that instance are.

> assumes everyone cares if the cheap tasty food is actually chicken

Doesn't need to be everyone who cares Just someone with an allergy or a moral preference to not eat dog.

> without the government, there would be a dangerous outbreak of cholera

All but the least effective governments have demonstrated an ability to stop cholera. Places with grossly ineffective government and poor education has shown a propensity to have cholera, look at Haiti.

I think these are both good. But if we want another example. There was a Chinese restaurant in Council Bluffs Iowa, a suburb of Omaha Nebraska (The city I am in now) that was serving stray cats. The owner thought it was a cheap alternative to chicken. The FDA shut them down, because stray cats don't get investigated for parasites, disease or poison.

In general it never gets this far because the FDA sets an absolute bottom line and most food businesses strive to be better than as can easy be seen with the whole organic and free range trend recently. But there will always be those trying to drive costs down at the expense of quality and safety.

EDIT - I just realized I skipped examples of value governments can add to business. How about seat belt fabric. Memory Foam, Rocket engine designs and satelite imagining for maps. That is just NASA. NOAA does a huge amount for mariners of all stripes. The SBA gives out loans. There are so many examples.

The point I was trying to make is that government isn't the only way to accomplish these things.

While the FDA does quite well at enforcing a standard, there is no evidence that the same practices could not happen as a natural occurrence of a free market.

Clearly, the vast majority of people care that those who prepare the food they buy do so in an educated and safe manner. If there were no law demanding such a standard, people would still want to live by that standard. Those people would still demand that those in the food industry find some way to prove that their business lives up to such a standard.

Such a scenario would still leave out the uneducated portion of the populace, who would unknowingly put themselves at risk. That is the only reason I can think of to prefer the current government-enforced methods.

TL;DR Food safety is an example of a problem that has many possible solutions, and while current government regulation is likely the best, there are other solutions that are possible, and even logical.

To bring this back to the discussion of net neutrality...

While there are logical reasons to support deregulation in most scenarios, I can find no honest logical reasons why not to regulate ISPs with the current net neutrality rules.

When we look at the specifics, we can plainly see that net neutrality is an edge case for popular conservative and libertarian ideology. I find it very important to consider it as such, and support net neutrality.

Oh man. I lived in a developing nation for a while. A couple of times, I had a week-long bout of food poisoning from "cheap and tasty" unregulated food.

It's a nice idea, loosing regulations because the market will decide, but after a couple days on the toilet, shitting your guts out because regulations hinder innovation or whatever, you know what I'd say? Fuck an unregulated marketplace. I will happily suffer the innovation-suffocating burdens of regulation if it means not having to endure that shit (literally) again.

So did I. The point of my comment was that you can avoid street food and eat at classier restaurants (or fast food outlets, or whatever) if you're so inclined. Me and a friend avoided street food during a month of travelling in India, and never had any stomach problems.

(Your gut fauna also adapts over time, which is why the locals don't get sick so often).

> because regulations hinder innovation or whatever

How did you get this from my comment? I said that in the case of food, regulations remove cheap options, and remove job opportunities.

To make it concrete: consider a low-income Western neighbourhood. Joe is a young single guy in his 20s working a low-wage job. He's tired after work and doesn't like to cook, but can't afford to eat out. Sally is a grandmother, in her late 50s, and needs a source of income that isn't too demanding. In an Asian country the Sallies could set up fried rice or noodle stalls selling cheap meals to the Joes, for the equivalent of a dollar or two. They've set up a mutual trade for mutual advantage, and they're both better off.

In a Western country Joe and Sally are banned from making this trade, ostensibly to protect Joe's interests. If Joe wants cheap food, his only option is to go to McDonald's, where they've made everything hyper-efficient and standardised to provide cheap food, while meeting minimum wage laws, hygiene regulations, and so on.

(Sometimes Westerners do make this trade. On my UK university campus, some local Indian stay-at-home mothers would cook up extra food and deliver meals to students for £2 ($3) a pop. They were breaking a ton of laws, of course).

"(Your gut fauna also adapts over time, which is why the locals don't get sick so often)."

Heh, this isn't actually true, or not meaningfully so. Where I lived, it was recognized that getting sick regularly was a fact of life. The place I lived had almost no tourism, so people getting sick were, in fact, just getting sick from an essentially unregulated food market.

But hey, freeeeee market, right?

> […] In an Asian country the Sallies could set up fried rice or noodle stalls selling cheap meals to the Joes, for the equivalent of a dollar or two. They've set up a mutual trade for mutual advantage, and they're both better off.

> In a Western country Joe and Sally are banned from making this trade, ostensibly to protect Joe's interests. If Joe wants cheap food, his only option is to go to McDonald's, where they've made everything hyper-efficient and standardised to provide cheap food, while meeting minimum wage laws, hygiene regulations, and so on.

So, if Sally can provide food cheaper than McDonald's, that means:

a. she is more efficient than McDonald's, she being a single woman, they being a multinational corporation, or

b. she doesn't conform to the same hygiene and nutrition standards, making less valuable products.

Which one seems more probable?

So eating establishments without proper food inspection and food safety laws is the new internet you desire? Brilliant. I'm sure all that money the Telcos save will go right back into the consumer's pocket and into increasing connection speeds too...

> This has been abundantly studied, contrary to your post.

Are you saying the economic downsides to regulation have been studied? Or are you saying there is abundant scholarly research that shows the costs of government regulation of private enterprise clearly outweigh the benefits?

Edit: typo