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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

It was over seventy years, after it was decided lead in fuel was a bad idea, before it was banned in road-going vehicles. [0] Keep that in mind when some politician or business owner goes on about "bureaucrats". Because "bureaucrats" to them means "someone who stands between me and more profits". "Bureaucrats" to you should mean "people that make sure this shit gets enforced".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and...

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When these regulators stop "retiring" to cushy jobs in the industry, I'll believe it's the politicians and not the regulators openly taking bribes in the form of future "jobs".

An easy fix would be for congress to pass a law preventing regulators from working in the industry they regulated, but then the politicians wouldn't also receive those same cushy "jobs".

Wasn’t there talk earlier this year of putting a 10 year delay on retired government officials taking these lobbying jobs? Did anything come from that?

Obama and Trump both instituted five year bans. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13770)

Unfortunately, they're largely ignored via waivers: https://www.vox.com/2017/6/1/15723994/trump-ethics-waivers

That sounds like it would prevent competent people from regulating.

Better would be to prosecute people who conspire to harm others by intentionally distorting policy. That's how literally all the other legal stuff seems to work.

I like it, but the conspiracy would be almost always impossible to prove. People in these positions don't 'conspire', they say "wouldn't it be nice" to a golfing buddy, who then does what they can to make it happen.

While I agree with the sentiment, keep in mind it's a little more complicated than that. People who work on some category of regulations can only find relevant work in the government or in that sector of industry. Making it impossible to move from the government to an industry job effectively traps people for life in their one job unless they change careers.

As a concrete example, my fiance is a lawyer working in environmental policy. She's worked for the EPA and for various environmental justice groups because she went with whatever jobs were available in her field, and that wouldn't be possible with your proposed change.

You can argue this prevents people like FCC's Wheeler, but the current administration has several examples refuting this. Is there no way that you can still work in the field without being able to influence policy?

> Making it impossible to move from the government to an industry job effectively traps people for life in their one job unless they change careers.

And?

And... that's an ignorant, facile and unenforceable policy.

And it’ll be necessary to either a) pay exorbitant salaries for these jobs to compensate for what is effectively an incredibly broad non-compete or b) hire idiots that can’t get jobs anywhere else.

There exist tertiary jobs that employ the same skillsets without the danger of pervasive incentives. No one minds if a EPA regulator that does agriculture cases his whole career then take a lawyer job in the fishing or mining industry. It's when that person drops immediately into a legal career at Monsanto that people start seeing a conflict of interests.

Why would anyone in the fishing or mining industry want a lawyer with no knowledge of those industries, only knowledge of agriculture? It's my experience that a lawyer who doesn't have experience in a specific industry is pretty useless as they don't know the topics or the norms. My experience working with lawyers who know the video game industry has been vastly more positive than with those that don't

The fact that nobody in the gun industry wants to touch them with a 10ft pole hasn't stopped the ATF from hiring people who know how guns work.

Hell, you can experience it first hand as a programmer. I could technically work on any programming job, from databases to JavaScript to game engines to machine learning, just like a lawyer could technically be any type of lawyer.

But it is way, way easier for me to get a job doing the exact same type of programming I've been doing for the last decade, in the same environment, and I get paid way, way more to do that, because my specific experience makes me so much more valuable.

"Government isn't working well! Easy fix, what we need is more government."

Smart thinking over here.

"We've cut budgets such that there aren't enough regulators to keep tabs on things, while J&J bullshits consumers, and your solution is more government?"

Yes, that is exactly my solution. Do you have suggestions?

Privatization is the solution to regulatory capture.

Larger government just creates more regulations to capture.

See also: the two-decade war against airbags in cars.

https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/abelt.html

Likewise, in the '40s, paint manufacturers promised to phase out lead in paint "voluntarily". In 1973 it was finally outlawed, with nothing like a beginning of a phase-out in the interim.

1973 was a low point for trust of fatcat industry, coinciding with revelation of Watergate abuses. It is hard to believe any new such regulation could be enforced today.

>Keep that in mind when some politician or business owner goes on about "bureaucrats". Because "bureaucrats"

You rarely hear even the small government politicians rail against bureaucrats because being able to use their influence withing the bureaucracy for favors (some more ethical than others) is a source of power for them. They may complain about the priorities of the bureaucracy (e.g "we should be funding X not Y") but they don't lament the existence of the administrative arm of government.

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