Comment by kkjjkgjjgg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kkjjkgjjgg | Hacker News Reader

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"I can still enter into a contract with you without ever telling anyone. I can buy something from you, in cash, and nobody needs to know. [...] As long as the regulators are doing their job."

Is he not aware that regulators in many places work towards making that impossible?

What are examples of good, helpful regulations, does he cite any? Or is it just a vague feeling that regulation is good, and governments are good and for helping people?

All I read is "bla bla power bad" - all those leftists have is "power theory". Power this, power that - power somehow explains everything. It is almost esoteric.

Even the bad things he claims happen without regulations (monopolies) are not proven to happen without regulation, and also not proven to be automatically bad things.

And his first sentence:

"Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy."

How does everyone feel so exploited? Who is greedy? Why are you in their power? How do they make it so that you don't have a choice? Goods for consumption generally get better and more affordable over time. So are the producers really so greedy?

What is stopping you from creating a better bank, better health care, better what not? The "rich, powerful, greedy" people are just people like you and me. You are not forced to use their products. With one exception, the government, whose power you can't escape - but that somehow is the one thing lefties like?

I mean some people did and created a better financial system. But now this leftie hates them, too. Guess it is just unbearable if people are independent and not victims like everybody else. And without asking him for permission to boot.

> What are examples of good, helpful regulations

There's some fairly obvious ones: we had a problem where a chemical we were using in many products (CFCs) was destroying a critical part of our atmosphere – ozone. CFCs were cheap, so in free market competition, companies were optimizing for short term success with the unaccounted for externality of increasing skin cancer rates in humans and other animals. Regulation is brought in to patch that externality – successfully helping the world transition to alternative technologies

You can see regulations as part free market capitalism, you just have to zoom out from individual corporations and consider the system patching out local minima with regulations to help achieve global minima.

I mean there's a sliding scaling from sophisticated regulations like CFCs and basic ones like laws against theft (despite it being cheaper to simply steal products from other people). I'm not sure you'd call laws against theft a regulation but it's in the same spirit as the CFCs example

Of course, regulations without careful thought and planning don't lead to optimization either – but the point is, from experience we've learned systems with 0 global regulations tend to have issues and enter in to local minima – so the trick is working out the right level and quality of regulation

"Free market capitalism" does not mean there should be no laws whatsoever. It is a trivial realization that markets have to operate within their given environment, including laws. Nevertheless you can aim for as much freedom as possible. You can make it illegal to shoot people, without having to set prices for goods and labor in law.

I don't think regulations is synonymous with basic laws in such discussion. And therefore the CFC example is also not a good one, as it is obviously an externality. Nobody claims it should be legal to pollute the environment for free.

A more complicated challenge is climate change, which is like the CFC example taken to the extremes. Since every company uses energy the responsibility is spread among everyone. However, every group, from countries to companies stands to lose competitively from using more expensive but less damaging sources of energy – the market pressures drive towards companies that take advantage of externalities like this

So a solution could be global regulation, where we all unilaterally agree to transition to better energy sources, however this has massive resistance and is the battle of our time

This sort of regulation is certainly more subtle than don't steal or shoot people but ultimately leads to a system that's better for all the players

More immediately and on the nose, in the UK companies have been increasingly dumping waste in our rivers since a relaxation of rules after leaving the EU regulations https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2021/09/the-raw-sewage-...

That is a common trope, supposedly free running capitalism would just waste as much energy as possible without regulation.

It is of course nonsense, even without regulations industries have an incentive to save on energy, as it is a cost factor.

Or think about cars - people would prefer to buy cars that use less energy, so that they have a wider range. Therefore there already is an incentive for car manufacturers to develop more energy efficient cars.

Also people can decide they only want to buy products that adhere to certain production standards, even without centralized government.

Overall, nobody claims externalities should have no price.

For sure, energy has a cost which you want to optimize for - no question about it. The crux is when that cost is artificially low: you can dump your radioactive waste in the river for as much as it costs to transport it, but the cost is then payed by the people downstream. Now as you say if this is tightly causally linked, the people downstream will fight back against you and then it's not so cheap. But the problem comes when the causality gets foggy; it takes decades before there's enough data gathered to connect the high cancer rates with the waste dumping miles upstream. By that time the people who made that decision made bank and exited and are beyond accountability

Where this causal disconnect occurs is where regulation is most effective

I think we agree, you want to price in your externalities, but pricing externalities _is_ regulation, so we're saying the same thing. Perhaps we're crossing wires somewhere

You keep talking about externalities. Obviously those should have a price. That is not a free market issue.

Its sort of a given to learned people that regulations are good. The fact you don't live in a factory town bartering cigarettes for Amazon Coin you use to buy your meals with is a testament to this. Or that your company isn't forcing you to work at gunpoint. The US allowed corporations to run free during industrialization for just 60 years and they managed to exploit people to such an extent that even the hands-off US government stepped in and started pushing regulations. When able to relentlessly pursue profits, companies will stop at no length to increase profits, and we have seen this all across the world. I believe your partisanship is clouding your judgment.

The author is also clearly not a leftist based on the contents of the article, and his allusions to centrally planned societies (aka their understanding of communism) as a fool's errand.

So you just use regulations synonymous with laws? Like the example of "no regulations" is that you can just shoot people that bother you?

Nobody argues that there should be no laws, so that is a pretty useless discussion.

But you can not say "without regulations, people would be free to murder each other, therefore all regulations are good". Some laws can be good, some can be bad.

"The author is also clearly not a leftist based on the contents of the article, and his allusions to centrally planned societies (aka their understanding of communism) as a fool's errand."

The more regulations you get, the further down you are on the path to centrally planned society. Regulations are central planning. Like demanding a minimum wage is central planning, it is literally planning economy, setting prices for things with disregard of the markets.

So if the author is in favor of that, he is a leftist, plain and simple.

Look at the way he writes: he laments that "Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." - and you want to tell me he is not following a collectivist, leftist ideology, yearning for a socialist utopia?

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