Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

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It's funny how corruption gets defined and re-defined by so many competing interests.

Milton Friedman, for example, famously said that 'Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation.'

This mentality, when applied to the food / medicine / drug trade, has some curious results. On one hand, it suggests we eliminate all criminal penalties for buying, selling and consuming all drugs, while on the other the normal criminal penalties for theft of drugs would apply. Note also that sellers could adulterate their product (no regulations, remember?) in any way they saw fit as long as it maximized their market efficiency (profit margins, basically), based on the belief that customers could shift to other producers if they didn't like the product.

The real result of criminalization of drugs, rather than regulation of drugs, is that a black market develops, characterized by violent conflicts between sellers over access to that market, control of production and supply, etc. This is why decriminalization makes a lot of sense, coupled with things like public health campaigns aimed at reducing usage, bans on advertising drugs and marketing drugs to children, etc.

My main problem with Milton Friedman's philosophy is the assumption that people actively investigate every product they consume. For example, if something says baby formula on the tin, most reasonable people will believe that it is baby formula, and not something terrible like drywall dust.

If the parent investigates the company and realizes that the company is fraudulent, of course they will switch to a company that is safer for their child. But will they do the same for every other product they take into their home? Of course not! There isn't enough time in the day for that.

Even if its just a little bit, some government oversite has to happen to protect the rights of consumers. Not to the point where it keeps the free market from innovating, but enough to make sure people aren't eating literal plastic and putting radium in makeup.

Even most libertarians support strong contract enforcement, because it lubricates the free market. You can have a free market without, but binding contracts make it work much more efficiently.

Truth in labeling & advertising should be grouped into that same category, in my opinion. It makes the market work better by reducing friction.

I see the difference being passive vs. active. The FDA would be active. Getting a bad product, finding a lawyer, filing a court case, getting a court date, going to trial would all be passive. It requires every individual to seek justice in an expensive manner. In addition, timing. Wouldn't it be better to avoid needless injury and death, than having to seek justice after the fact?

Once a bad product enters the market, the market can be forever tainted. Look at China and baby formula.[1] No one trusts the baby formula there now. A few bad apples spoils the bunch. You could look at this as the FDA actually protecting the market by keeping it at a trusted quality.

[1] https://qz.com/1323471/ten-years-after-chinas-melamine-laced...

This is where the entire libertarian ideology starts to fall apart for me.

Who does "contract enforcement" in a libertarian society? Who enforces "truth in labeling and advertising"? How do you scale those things without introducing regulation into the market?

Edit: grammar

It's not falling apart. It's expressing its final form, which is an all encompassing world government with the duty of tracking the ownership of every molecule of matter on the planet, and of enforcing every contract without judgement on its contents or the conditions under which it was signed.

Libertarians are people who believe that markets are natural, like trees. Markets are not natural, they are arbitrary sets of rules that people agree to abide by in order to have the agreements they make within those rules enforced by whatever institution is dictating those rules. Markets are an endorsement by the powerful, where at the least the loss of that endorsement will get you ejected from the market, but at the most it could get you broke and imprisoned.

So the fact that they don't recognize what markets are, and think that they can be free (either as in speech or beer) forces them to make governments the ultimate market, but their desire for unlimited freedom and autonomy (or rather limited only by your property) forces them to deny governments the right to make rules about their own markets.

Instead, they revert to natural rights, natural freedoms, natural markets, social Darwinism, etc. Mysticism. That's why when you scratch a Libertarian for long enough, you eventually either find a blood & soil racist or an ex-Libertarian.

A libertarian would argue that competing services like consumer reports emerge to handle that kind of cognitive overhead.

Libertarianism does not imply atomization. There’s nothing preventing people from creating larger groups of people that facilitate cooperation. It just has to be voluntarily entered into.

Discussions about when to grant authority to enforce things not specified in an explicit agreed to contract is where the debate about the problems with libertarianism belongs, imo.

I'm not libertarian but the obvious solution is consumer advocacy & reporting groups and such, who certify products as "legit". They do the hard work of figuring out which products are good. But unlike the FDA, they have a market incentive to do this effectively.

I don't propose this belief, but it's the libertarian solution to the problem you pose.

People like Friedman are either paid mouthpieces or complete loony-toons ideologues. That’s the only way to make “libertarianism” make sense.

> Note also that sellers could adulterate their product (no regulations, remember?) in any way they saw fit as long as it maximized their market efficiency (profit margins, basically), based on the belief that customers could shift to other producers if they didn't like the product.

They could add addictive drugs [back] into 'normal' products without telling people, to get people hooked on their product, which would 'force' competing products to do the same or risk irrelevance.

For instance, Coca Cola could quietly reintroduce the cocaine to their already poisonous concoction, making it even more addictive. Pepsi would be incentivized to follow suit.

At this point, adding cocaine to Coke would be adding value. It might even be worth buying then. And probably surprisingly popular if put to a vote.

And they'd use crack or amphetamines as the "pep" in their name implies.

At an even more meta level, whether interests are even competing is itself something subject to differing definitions.

Take the word “regulation”. According to wiktionary, it comes from “regō”, which means “to keep straight, direct, govern, rule”.

Direction requires a desired destination. We would like to steer the environment away from highly adulterated/dangerous drugs, away from harmful drug use generally, away from territorial violence, and away from drugs being sold to children.

Those that advocate for “deregulation” as well as decriminalization are really advocating for emergent peer to peer regulation instead of regulation by fiat. They generally think the best way to keep systems accountable and moving in the desired societal direction is for individuals to have as much freedom and direct feedback as possible about the consequences of their actions, which they argue leads to better individual decision making due to that better feedback.

Those that advocate for government regulation generally think it’s easier to keep systems accountable if you concentrate the most competent and responsible people into an explicit, transparent enforcement organization, which they argue leads to better decision making due to that better guidance and enforcement.

The former worry most about ineffective or bad actors in government enforcement systems distant from feedback/information. The latter worry most about ineffective or bad actors in the populace that are allowed to grow without coordinated enforcement/ability to organize.

I don’t think a lot of the arguing over different solutions to drug problems are really arguing about incompatible approaches, they’re just focused on different parts of the problem.

In my personal view, I think the BIGGEST problem from all camps is a lack of desire to really confront the core issues/invest the time and effort needed to actually solve these problems, which is a lot more about sitting down with people in very unpleasant situations/doing a lot of very difficult therapeutic communication, dealing with personal anger at irresponsible people, dealing with our disgust, not liking what we see reflected about ourselves, not liking to admit how much we actually DON’T control, not liking to acknowledge our own hypocrisies/how we contribute to the problem, not liking to acknowledge vast experiential differences and how important close connections are, not liking to admit how many people don’t prioritize themselves or others and are ungrateful/resentful, etc. We’d like to simply “get someone else to deal with it”, whether that be the government, the immediate family/individuals themselves, an app, a magic pill, some kind of secret drug problem destroying machine, etc.

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