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Comment by banana_feather | Hacker News Reader

> Laws should be as local as practically possible.

You guys are every lawyer's dream. Yes, please, continue believing you're following some great American tradition of strong local government by submitting to the whims of your local Boss Tweed and the five judges in your county, I play golf with them once a month. Oh, you have a legal problem and need to navigate the rats nest of weird local laws? Great, you can choose from one of three tax attorneys that know the local tax regime as it applies to your business. I play golf with them too, and (coincidentally) we all bill $1,100 an hour.

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This is being downvoted I guess for its tone, but I think the point is a good one: Laws that apply over a large jurisdiction are easier and cheaper to comply with. Maybe a good example of this is laws surrounding alcohol; I think it's kind of crazy that a winery in CA trying to ship an order back to a tourist's home has to understand and comply with local and municipal laws on the other side of the country and knowing which counties are dry and where their specific boundaries are ... which creates real cost and complexity that each of those businesses contends with, and higher prices get passed on to all consumers.

When companies decide the complexity is too high, they sometimes just have to target the most stringent law that they can reasonably cover, e.g. car companies meeting CA emission standards can make CA the defacto national standard. A buyer in Texas is presumably paying a higher price for a car designed to meet a law in another state. It would be more democratic if there was just a national standard.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for the idea of making laws uniform for the convenience of large companies that operate across many jurisdictions.

Besides the fact that the reduced cost of compliance you mention comes at the expense of the localities freedom to govern themselves, federal laws make it more convenient for these companies to manipulate the system to their advantage. A large company can bribe a couple hundred federal politicians to get their way instead of having to bribe many thousands across so many state legislatures or even more at a municipal level.

Indeed, diversity is resilience in many of life's categories.

> I don't have a lot of sympathy for the idea of making laws uniform for the convenience of large companies that operate across many jurisdictions.

What makes you think that only large companies operate across many jurisdictions?

and in fact, it's only large companies that can afford to have a person or team to work through the details, keeping smaller companies out of the market and unable to compete.

Isn't this the definition of regulatory capture? Which usually comes first, the large companies or the regulations that only large companies could keep up with?

The idea of the feds choosing poorly, or being corrupted, and deciding on one set of regulations for everyone scares me sometimes. Health care didn't turn out so great, the ACA put a stop to several states that had interesting plans and implementations of their own, and is basically a subsidy for the health care industry as it currently exists, whose lobbyists apparently crafted the text of that bill. Another example is privacy rights - the feds aren't doing much, and I'm glad that some states are.

Why should I care that companies get uniform laws more than I care about these issues that matter to me?

I'm not saying that we can't have federal regulations, but I don't think there's anything wrong with having local regulations even if companies are inconvenienced, especially for evolving industries.

Smaller businesses, and even many large corporations, consider the fines and penalties of violating local laws as a cost of doing business.

That is to say: Conduct business, if you get fined or penalized for it then note it down for future reference. It's cheaper than hiring an entire legal department to trove through cryptic manuscripts only relevant to regions measured in tens of square miles. Usually.

Obligatory IANAL.

Point taken. I can't edit my original post, but I'd be happy to apply this logic to any company, large or small. Company profits are not more important that voters.

Pretty much all voters work for companies or buy from companies and are impacted by the costs which are passed on to them.

We can imagine situations where voters place more importance on things other than money, right?

Like maybe the voters would prefer human police officers as opposed to armed drones, even if the drones were cheaper. Or maybe the voters don't want to be tracked by cameras everywhere they go, given how this data can be abused, even if it costs them $x more per year to shop.

I'm just saying legal costs impact everyone and giving money to legions of lawyers isn't free for John Q Voter.

But couldn't it also go the other way, where small local companies who don't need a legion of lawyers would have a competitive advantage over larger companies trying to operate across many jurisdictions? I assume this depends on the regulations being imposed.

We already have large companies with legions of lawyers who have the resources to manipulate federal and state politicians in their favor, using regulatory capture and other means to avoid competition. There's a cost associated with that, too.

I love how costs are immediately passed on to consumers and employees, but profits remain and should never be allowed to decrease ever for shareholders

I agree. When can we have one-world government where unreachable aloof bureaucrats tell others how to live from across an ocean?

Universal laws with no nuance or adjustments for local conditions are just so awesome I am trembling in anticipation.

If we're lucky, they might even outlaw these evil lawyers that you lampoon so effortlessly.

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