Bangladesh saved lives by getting lead out of turmeric spice

The introduction covers food regulation from Biblical and Roman times to the present. If you think about how many of the Biblical rules are devoted to food handling in some sense, it starts to become clear how food regulation is civilization and the state, as much as any other kind of ancient law. I will never understand the Libertarian dream of a "prelapsarian" world where everyone is free to sell poison to everyone else with no consequences.

All customers always checking all food for poisons is not reasonable at all.

The world has had millennia of not regulating very much, and the market very rarely sorted it out.

> People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help.

GoFundMe raises about $650 million for medical costs each year[0]. That's just one little thing, I suppose, but there are many, many NGOs, charities, religious institutions and unaffiliated individuals providing personal care inside their communities and outside. There's plenty of care that /cannot be provided/ by these organisations, and was not provided in the past by private charities either. Neither could provide cancer treatment or cure a patient with major injuries from a car accident. That's a job for institutionalized healthcare.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoFundMe#Medical_fundraising

Even if we assume safety ratings for a complex food supply chain resulting in tens of thousands of one man businesses selling to people earning a dollar a day is a massive market opportunity, brands and safety labels are trivially copied by sufficiently people selling adulterated food, so they alone fundamentally don't solve the problem. Only a government can step in and regulate that IP, and at that point they might be better off just banning the poisoning...

Did you just use the rating agencies as a POSITIVE example? The financial crash that partly came about because those rating agencies were 100% corrupt and didn't work at all you know...

Exactly. The market is the decentralized method by which information is distributed.

>Straw-man

Yes, agreed. I wonder how much laissez-faire material some of these commenters have actually read. Perhaps they read from a different flavor of "market absolutism", which brings the question of unnecessary generalization.

In my reading of the Rothbardian ancap canon, insurance companies, liability for damages and private certification boards are advanced. Under this system imperfect information is taken as a given. Market participants like private food safety inspectors have an incentive to have better information than their competitors.

Contrast the above to the government regulation schemes where acceptable levels of adulterants are not necessary to report. Similarly, polluters can freely pollute within the EPA guidelines without liability. One could make the same leap of attributing "perfect information" to government regulators. If not for perfect information, how else can the FDA know the acceptable level of a contaminant?

Private regulatory and certification bodies would give consumers choices for cleaner standards than the government monopoly. I hope it goes without saying that the existence of a state backed regulatory body makes it harder for a private one to enter the market.

Finally, in response to the top level comment, it is worth noting that if a similar comment were made in favor of markets rather than regulation, one could reasonably expect it to be flagged into oblivion. Perhaps rightly so, because the topic has derailed the discussion. It speaks to the depth of the discussion when market opponents haven't even bothered to read what they are criticizing. HN isn't the place for this.

The real thing is a society with a government that takes care of these problems outside of a market...

Polluters don't contribute individually to climate change just for themselves or their customers, they contribute -- each in a small way -- to the problem for everyone on the planet.

If factory pollution was somehow isolated to just the factory or people buying things from that factory, instead of just going into everyone's air, regulation would be much less necessary, because in that case yes, consumer behavior would change. People wouldn't want smog inside their homes because they bought a new widget from a polluting manufacturer.

This is the inherent problem with people complaining that they have the right to pollute with their cars or factories or what have you as an argument against regulation. The pollution doesn't just stay next to the person creating it! If someone invents a box that captures all the fumes that car puts off and localizes it to the car itself, then sure, pollute all you want.

I am a Princeton trained economist from the 1980's and not once, not ever do we talk about non-cooperative behavior not existing. Rather, it is sub-optimal and self-defeating in the long run and that's why economies that evolve into hierarchical control eventually result in rebellion.

And bewilderingly about the last claim, but yes, I know, racism/sexism is sometimes considered irrational by some economists, because, um, you know, it is?

My theory is the rise of Hindunationationalism, and nationalism in general in India, which leads to the feeling of needing to defend ones country against any perceived attacks. Combine this with a huge country and rising levels of English proficency and you will get that type of comments on English speaking online boards.

The govt that replaced them took note, and used old laws to effectively crush dissent in mainstream media (major newspapers and the top TV channels) while building an army of loyal followers fuelled by bot-energy who invade any comment section seen to criticise the Modi govt.

It is hard to say how much of the country is nationalist. perhaps only the 35% odd per cent that voted for Modi in a first-past the post system are possibly in this club. But online, they dominate discourse.

It is a strategically built system, with Whatsapp forwards decided in advance and lines of thought determined through centralised control. It made use of the analytics Obama used and even pioneered the use of newer companies like Cambridge Analytica even before Brexit, to control discourse on social media.

Some people genuinely drink the cool-aid, but rarely does an intelligent person do so. Nationalists are usually upper-caste and elite and prone to self-victimhood ideals about how they are oppressed.

(I’d love to understand what causes this tendency. My speculation is that it’s the “salvation through faith alone” of Protestant Christianity. If you’re not defined by what you do, maybe you’re liable to take criticism of your actions less personally.)

It's on the level of "you made a choice, alone, purely for the benefit of your family, not much socialist nanny state going on now."

There's plenty to discuss and even argue about across ideological lines. Unless it's straw-men all the way down when there becomes no point, which seems a shame to me.

Maybe next time phrase the thing more along the lines of:

"How do libertarians view such market regulation success?"

I don’t think it would be too much to clearly add a sentence or few in that FAQ entry about how a person can get an account and its history erased from hn, even if its via an email (though such a button would be nice — which maybe just sends an email mentioning the hn username?)

But I also acknowledge that matters of account and data deletions aren’t straightforward.

They have no EU legal presence whatsoever last time I checked.