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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Deregulate the environment and you will be drinking polluted water, and breathing polluted air. Your food will be likely exposed to pollution too.

Deregulate labor and you'll have exploited workers working 100 hours per week, being constantly harassed by their employers, people being discriminated at the workplace, as well as people exposed to poor safety conditions where they can get injured or killed.

Deregulate consumer rights and now anyone can scam you and sell you something that doesn't work with no right to a refund.

Deregulate restaurants and now noone is liable if you end up with food poisoining or die from allergies due to poor hygiene and bad practices.

And the list goes on and on. Regulations are not bad. Excessive regulations are bad. The opposite excess, no regulations, is equally bad.

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> Deregulate consumer rights and now anyone can scam you and sell you something that doesn't work with no right to a refund.

Is the right to refund really regulated? Or it's that exact case where competition and market forces do work for the mutual benefit of seller and consumer?

Yes, and my guess is that there is more money to be made off of deregulation than on regulation. Thus, more corruption related to the party that wants to deregulate.

Really? Look at Tammany Hall in NYC and Chicago. And the planning commission in SF. All massive Bureaucracies where nothing could be done unless money greased the wheels.

Not quite.

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

Why are you sure of it? Regulation often gives more backroom deal type of corruption and monopolies, deregulation on the other hand can give more anarchy. I don't think simple view of having one, regulation or deregulation, and itsa good thing is very intelligent thought.

In the states that I have lived, the voter information pamphlet lists who supports and opposes every initiative. Every time that a new regulation on the ballot would benefit the public at the expense of business, it’s always the same: on one side are Republicans and some multi-national corporations, the other side are Democrats and public-interest groups (environmentalists, etc).

I don’t think that public-interest groups have as much money for backroom deals as multi-national corporations. So that’s why I’m pretty sure of it.

Yet democrats are taking back room bribes to approve new construction. Huh!

The regulation enables the corruption.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/sf-publi...

I’d bet that the dollar amounts involved where appointed officials corruptly use regulation to solicit bribes in the U.S. is orders of magnitude smaller than the amounts involved in “campaign donations” to elected officials to prevent and remove regulations.

The amount in question in that article is $5,000.

For comparison, the amount in question here is $34,000:

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/12/alaska-republican-senato...

Would regulation with transparency be the best of both? Because it seems tax law changes so often and violating it so trivial I doubt it'd be better.

IMO those in charge should be forced to drink/breath from whichever area tested most polluted on a regular basis, and as a public event. Once they can no longer hide or pass on the consequences they should take the problems more seriously.

Regulation raises the barrier of entry for startups. Fewer startups means less competition. Less competition means less incentive for the incumbents to do "the right thing" in any field, be that hiring, ecological impact, consumer rights and so on.

When it comes to the economy, we should legislate and tax externalities. For everything else regulation is uniformly bad.

OK, fine. Let's remove all forms of regulation, shall we?

Someone joins your company and starts leaking all your intellectual property. It is all good, though, because legislation related to that doesn't exist.

A developer joins your company, and shortly after uploads your entire code base to github. That's OK due to lack of legislation saying otherwise.

A sysadmin changes all the passwords and asks you for a ransom to unlock your production database. That's also OK.

Your ISP randomly makes your internet 99% slower and then asks you for an exorbitant amount of money. That's also OK.

The accountant forged your signature and stole all the money. That's also OK.

Your customers randomly decide to not pay you. That's also OK.

Your employees start dismantling the office and taking furniture and equipment home. That's OK.

The mailman shows up wearing the company swag you ordered. Doesn't matter anymore.

HR people upload a spreadsheet with everyone's personal information and salaries to the Internet. That's OK.

Some larger company sends some gangsters to force you to sell the company for a fraction of its price. That's OK.

As you can see, saying "regulation is bad" is nonsensical. Without certain guarantees, businesses cannot exist.

I believe you are confused. Nobody is disputing the rule of law (and especially contract law) and the role of government in upholding it. What you are describing is pretty much anarchy and nobody is arguing for that.

I think the distinction between rule of law and regulation is fuzzy. Different people will draw the line in different places, with a heavy bias towards the current system for any given jurisdiction. (Devil you know.)

Likewise, I am not advocating for excessive regulation that fosters corruption. I am advocating for common sense.

As a thought experiment: How would you solve those problems with your hands tied behind your back (i.e. you don't have a government to rely on)? Just try one - assume you're in a fictional universe and writing a novel or something.

Anywho, the problem with this trail of discussion is that you can come up with an infinite amount of "problems" and libertarians can likewise come up with a "solution" to each one. However your rebuttal would always be yet-another problem because the original "solution" didn't cater for some arbitrary corner case or something basic that you assume can only come from a society with a government.

E.g. "Your customers randomly decide to not pay you. That's also OK."

Answer: Have an escrow organization that both parties trust. Rebuttal: "Your escrow organization decides it doesn't like a certain legitimate business and won't accept your trade." Or "Your escrow organization's owner is buddy-buddy with your customer and he decides to not keep their part of the bargain". Okay - "contracts", followed with "but who will enforce the contracts", etc etc.

As a side note: A lot of the time libertarians and anarcho-capitalists don't "pick" lack of regulation out of practicality, but rather out of plain moral principle. A lot of what is considered "regulation" and "rule of law", when stripped of it's noble/protective aura, is just authoritarianism and bully-like behavior.

Let's entertain this idea...

Without a monopoly of violence, you have 3 alternatives:

a) Multiple entities keeping each other in check, in perpetual competition...

b) One faction becomes more powerful than the rest and eventually assimilates the rest or turn them into vassals.

c) Factions decide to ally up and either assimilate the rest and make vassals out of them.

Basically, smaller fish gets eaten by larger fish. The world is just like a large prison where you have to either become a large entity or belong to a large alliance otherwise you're fucked.

We have had and currently have A, B and C, we just don't "see it" because it has an aura of "Democracy" and "will of the people". If we truly had freedom, it would be part of society, every government, the UN and considered a fundamental Human Right for individual groups of people to voluntarily group together and decide to "leave" their state/nation/entity/vassal/government/faction, and form their own "monopoly of violence" within their geographic area.

But we don't have that. We belong and are forced under subjugation to our individual governments without any say in the matter other than "voting" and "community participation". We can dress it up any which way we want, but we're forced into a relationship by virtue of birth and we have no option to leave.

You’re only looking at one side. Regulations can also encourage corruption - if I can’t even open my doors unless I get a permit, well, that’s plenty of incentive for whoever control that permit to ask for something to “sweeten the pie”.

Is that form of corruption a systemic problem here in the U.S.? I don’t think that it is.

On the other hand, campaign contributions are common, legal, and involve large sums of money (especially to PACs).

Systemic corruption of elected officials, resulting in de-regulation in order to benefit wealthy shareholders at the expense of the public, is more concerning to me than the possibility of low-level officials seeking bribes.

Your logic only makes sense if you equate legal fundraising to back room, illegal corruption.

To me, someone funding raising through a legal, transparent PAC might not be desirable, but it’s far less insidious than backroom dealings that pervert the rule of law.

I’m suspicious of any large transfer of wealth from an individual or organization to a politician, whether that’s through campaign donations or some other means.

It seems strange not to take the next logical step and conclude that there were some backroom dealings, especially if the politician later takes an action that is favorable to the donor.

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