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Comment by kmacdough | Hacker News Reader

Minimal regulations, but more importantly, practically zero enforcement. I remember a local electrician saying stuff like "ah just don't tell anyone and it'll be fine". I was utterly unsurprised, if devastated, when the apartment complex collapsed.

It's best to keep regulations lean and manageable, so we don't waste tons on unnecessary work and triple-checks, but regulations they exist for a very good reason.

Anyone who claims "regulations" are anti-business forget that business aren't the core of countries OR economies. People are. The only people who benefit from deregulation are the ones who own the businesses.

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I love regulations, but there's a legitimate problem that large and entrenched businesses can write their own laws and bribe politicians to pass them and/or appoint their own into regulatory agencies. It allows businesses to put insane regulations in place just to keep competitors away and leaves them to police themselves which works as well as you'd expect.

Regulations are a tool. Useful as hammers, but just as painful if applied incorrectly.

Makes it sound like the answer is to remove owners and states from the equation

Lol moving it to an even less accountable regulatory authority is a really bad idea.

At least at the local level if something is insanely broken you can have action to correct it. But getting a law to do anything at the federal level is almost impossible unless you fill it with pork for every lobbyist in the DC zip codes.

Oops I meant states more generally, incl fed

Us: "People abuse laws and regulations!"

You: "Let's get rid of all laws and regulations then!"

hehe

btw, we’re not talking about people, we’re talking about Big Biz. crony capitalism is capitalism

Good try, Mr Lenin :D

Until someone other than the government has the ability to throw people in jail and levy massive fines for violating regulations they're the ones for the job. The problem isn't who is in authority. Everyone is, to some degree, vulnerable to massive amounts of money. The solution is to increase transparency and hold people accountable for corruption.

agree that the problem isn't who is in authority, disagree that crony capitalism can be solved with reform to reach some purer more egalitarian form of capitalism - crony capitalism is capitalism

btw, graeber/wengrow research has found that it's historically inaccurate to say that all this is necessary or inevitable in larger society

I'm open to alternatives to capitalism. I'm just waiting to see a superior system successfully put into practice and maintained, at an appreciable scale, for multiple generations in the modern world.

Without that, proposed alternatives are great for thought provoking theoretical and philosophical consideration, but are without much utility when it comes to replacing what we have. The system we have now is largely failing us, but it can be carefully reformed into something a bit better. Throwing it out and replacing it with something entirely other isn't something I'd support without knowing exactly what we'd be getting ourselves into and that means seeing it (or something very close to it) at work.

well that's basically what the graeber/wengrow speaks to - looking at actual human history to understand how these alternatives might have already been put into practice, at scale and over time, in post-agriculture discovery societies. that's about the best you will get for existing demonstrated capability at scale in an approximately modern age

> I was utterly unsurprised, if devastated, when the apartment complex collapsed.

This was the literal collapse of the Surfside condominium!? Wow.

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