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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

>When it becomes too onerous, pare it back

Unfortunately one man's onerous is another's not enough when it comes to regulation, and seemingly due to ideology, not rationality.

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Worse, well done regulation makes problems go away. Which makes it seem like they are not needed.

Consider those mattress tags which actually saved hundred of thousands of lives, but now seem pointless. We could probably get rid of them and nothing bad would happen for decades, but the risk is higher than you might think.

Link for the interested https://www.livescience.com/33039-why-do-mattresses-have-do-...

At the end of the day "rationality" and "ideology" are more or less synonymous. Few individuals believe their ideology is irrational, after all, and all "rational" really means is, "that which is most consistent with everything else I believe to be true."

What bothers me in the context of regulation is how it seems like regulations as a group are frequently called out as "bad and unnecessary", but when it comes to specifics (i.e. specific unnecessary regulations or proposing targeted reforms) it's either crickets, or, in the case of some of the recent regulatory rollbacks, the ideas lie somewhere between "pants-on-head stupid" and "disastrous" [1][2]. Likewise, when people do call out stupid-sounding regulations, it's pretty common to find genuinely good reasoning behind them [3]. I guess I'd be a bit happier if I'd seen anything productive come out of the antiregulatory push in the past decade - instead it seems like it's mostly being used as an intellectual Trojan horse to increase the power of corporations and give them the freedom to pollute indiscriminately.

[1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-s-epa-rolls-back-... [2] - https://www.cnet.com/news/net-neutrality-is-now-really-offic... [3] - https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/02/business/uncertain-ho...

Exactly. It's also due to our inability to give straight up answers to questions like, What is the value of a human life? How does that value vary depending on age? What is the worth of an extra month of life? How should we decide where limited medical resources go?

Without straight answers to these, every bad story becomes a mob outcry for more regulation.

Why would we care about the answers to these questions other than for regulation?

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