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Comment by jnwatson | Hacker News Reader

Much like vaccines, meat inspection, and building codes, we've forgotten what it's like without them. We (Great Britain and USA) have been making securities regulations for 400 years.

The important lesson of securities regulation is that it helps the "good" guys more than it hurts the bad guys.

When I buy 100 shares of PZZA, I want to be reasonably confident that Papa Johns is cooking pizza and not the books. That confidence, or trust in the system, reduces friction that helps both buyers and sellers of securities.

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A case for mandatory vaccination can be made, as it addresses public health threats, which are negative externalities. Meat inspection cannot. You can choose to eat only government certified meat and not suffer any ill effects from non-certified meat being available on the market.

Just because you want products certified by a government body to be safe doesn't mean you have a right to force others to live according to your standards.

> A case for mandatory vaccination can be made, as it addresses public health threats, which are negative externalities. Meat inspection cannot.

Meat inspection deals with a different failure of ideal markets than direct externalities, to wit, information asymmetry. However,the market inefficiency produced by information assymetry itself has negative externalities, so it's not unrelated.

People, left to their own devices, manage complexity effectively.

For example, most people don't understand how microprocessors work. But this is addressed through an effective and spontaneous process of delegating responsibility.

The government can play a positive role in helping manage this complexity, by providing certification programs, and freely available public information. What it should not do is constrain the actions of individuals, by mandating that a particular standard be used.

There is a massive negative externality for allowing scammers to run free in a situation where the upfront ability to assess fitness-of-goods is lacking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

the money quote being

    The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in 
    the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the 
    cost also must include the loss incurred from 
    driving legitimate business out of existence.

That's not an externality. An honest business is not entitled to any customer's business. If the customer wants to squander their money away at the casino, leaving them with no money to spend at the honest business, they have that right. It's their money, and they are not obligated to spend it at the honest business.

And in any case, the market for lemons is a theoretical exercise. It does not actually happen in real markets, because there are various market mechanisms that emerge to address it.

the point isn't about anyone's "rights" about having money spent on them/spending their money.

The point is that everyone is worse off in a situation like this, both customer and (legitimate) business.

It is a type of market failure, everyone loses.

I think this is a special case of Gresham's law that bad currency drives out good. The problem is information asymmetry. You may be trying to buy SEC securities, but if they are swamped with fakes, it causes huge friction costs to figure out whether to transact and that hurts the market. Only experts (accredited investors?) have the resources to play.

Everyone is not worse off. We have seen rapid innovation in the Bitcoin market, toward far better risk management and security practices, in the absence of regulatory restrictions. Some speculative claim that everyone is worse off if they're free doesn't justify robbing someone of their rights.

> And in any case, the market for lemons is a theoretical exercise. It does not actually happen in real markets, because there are various market mechanisms that emerge to address it.

The "market mechanisms" you speak of are government regulations establishing minimum standards and forms of redress (e.g., and most on the nose, lemon laws).

No, there are market mechanisms that address this as well. Government restrictions are not market mechanisms.

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