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Comment by happyopossum | Hacker News Reader

> This is what 0 regulation and free market capitalism looks like.

Nope, that’s nothing like what this is. Oil pipelines are heavily regulated, with ZERO competition. As government protected monopolies, they’re the exact opposite of a free market.

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I was exaggerating. Sure they're regulated, but "heavily" is also an overstatement compared to how much they should be regulated. This is no different than how when talking about installing a new pipeline they say there's all these fail-safes, protections, monitoring, inspections, etc, but then oil leaks happen and it's found that the pipe had been deteriorating for months if not years which shows they actually aren't under the scrutiny that's claimed and there aren't protections in place. Or they lobby to have their pipeline self-inspected similar to what Tyson was able to negotiate with their meat plants. That's just one example of many. Sure in theory there's all this regulation, but somehow we keep having disaster after disaster that would have been avoided if all these regulations were enforced.

> Sure in theory there's all this regulation, but somehow we keep having disaster after disaster that would have been avoided if all these regulations were enforced.

Making new regulations is not helpful when the problem is the existing regulations are not enforced.

But making new regulations that also won't be enforced is the easiest way to show that Congress and regulators are doing something. Following fiery hearings of course.

"We've got to protect our phoney baloney jobs!"

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