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Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

That is misleading at best. The FAA was instructed to let the industry to regulate itself more, a typical republican/libertarian belief. Boeing being allowed to self regulated created this mess.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-tru...

>Still, the US DOT mandated that the FAA begin the process of review to reduce regulations. The FAA assigned this task to ARAC, effectively putting the question of what rules to cut and which to eliminate before creating new ones in the hands of a body that includes representatives from manufacturers and airlines.

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But an inherent bug of government regulation is that it's always vulnerable to lobbying like you cited. So it's still a failure of regulation, except one that is permanent and unsurprising.

Our government is quite vulnerable to corruption by the rich and powerful. You will watch some propose that, since the rich have corrupted the governement's protections for the people, that those protections should be removed. But this is the original goal in the first place: Remove protection for the people against the abuse by the powerful.

>> That is misleading at best. The FAA was instructed to let the industry to regulate itself more, a typical republican/libertarian belief. Boeing being allowed to self regulated created this mess.

> But an inherent bug of government regulation is that it's always vulnerable to lobbying like you cited. So it's still a failure of regulation, except one that is permanent and unsurprising.

It's a failure of regulation that the regulated would lobby to weaken regulation?

Yes, among other aspects of regulatory capture.

Is the solution to eliminate regulation, so the regulated don't have to bother to "capture it" -- and just decide to live with all the problems regulation can solve or mitigate?

When someone reports a software bug to you, do you often ask them if the solution is to abandon the entire product? This doesn't seem like a productive methodology.

No, that's why I phrased my comment as a question. When the implementation difficulties of regulation come up on libertarian-leaning forums, it often seems like it's really an indirect way of arguing against the whole concept and practice of regulation (e.g. like this comment describes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19424511). I just wanted to see if that was the case here or not, hence the question.

Libertarians probably don't often advocate the strawman position of no regulation whatsoever, or the ill-defined yet ludicrous "self regulation", but rather independent regulation by third-party companies, such as is the case in the kosher food certification industry, or the Underwriters Laboratories, or PCI compliance.

> position of no regulation whatsoever, or the ill-defined yet ludicrous "self regulation", but rather independent regulation by third-party companies

I think these positions are essentially the same, at least in the case of most consumer-facing regulation. The latter would cause a myriad of captive "independent regulatory" bodies to emerge to confuse consumers, complete with slick websites and easy to confuse names and logos (or outright fraudulent ones). It would be hard to sort through them, and no one will have the time to do it.

Kosher labeling seems to work decently, even though "nobody has the time" to figure out what any of the logos mean.

Meanwhile, evidently "nobody has the time" for knocking on enough congressmen's doors to override Big Business' billion-dollar lobbying efforts, and so here we are watching planes fall from the sky.

> Kosher labeling seems to work decently, even though "nobody has the time" to figure out what any of the logos mean.

Mainly because it relies on government regulation to function, namely trademark law. It's also probably a fairly unique case, since I doubt there's a ton of money in kosher food production (meaning the payoff for abusing the system is low), and the people who care about keeping kosher care about it a lot and can focus on it due to the presence of other regulation.

Are you arguing that it was a failure of the government regulation by allowing the self regulation that caused the mess?

Yes.

If a suspect nicely asks a police officer not to arrest them, and the officer complies, that's a failure of policing.

The only difference here is that the vulnerability of regulatory bodies to asking nicely is so well-recognized that it has a fancy name ("Regulatory Capture"), and is backed by loads of published research, and quite frankly is probably the reason that the business class even submits to this sort of regulation at all.

The industry didn't lobby the FAA to allow more self regulation, the POTUS demanded it.

A more accurate analogy would be the police chief ordering the officer not to arrest the judge's son for drunk driving.

Yes, your analogy is fine.

If the police chief was asked on a golf course not to arrest someone, but instead do "self policing", and he complied, it's still a failure in policing, and not any failure of whatever "self policing" is supposed to be.

Maybe we need a regulation solution that doesn't involve handing over ultimate authority half the time to a party that is consistently on record as opposing regulation?

Not to diminish the role of the FAA in this, but do other nations not do their own certifications of new aircraft? Is it a nation of origin thing? e.g. Boeing is regulated by the FAA and everyone trusts the FAA, then Airbus gets regulated by EASA and everyone trusts EASA?

That's basically how it works for complex aircraft. The 777 was the first airliner to receive automatic EASA approval after FAA acceptance.

Smaller nations follow FAA or EASA. Russia and China have their own certification systems but defer largely to the Big Two for imports. However it is notable that the Chinese regulator took a long time and much persuading before they accepted the Max.

Why it isn't done at an international level I don't know. Small aircraft could still be certificated nationally if they're not intended for export.

The industry has been trending this way for some time now. Pretending it's been a 'republican/libertarian' belief problem does no service to anyone. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...

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