That's why we have regulation: to establish the minimum standards.
Simple medical devices like wheelchairs (Class I or Class II) are also not super over-regulated, you don't need to do clinical trials to certify them. All-in-all it'll cost you around $10m, which is not at all a moat.
Only if a wronged party has the resources (time, money, political capital) to pursue it.
Which is but one reason why it is deeply silly to rely on it to make a society go.
Regulation is by nature slow and highly susceptible to corruption or stagnation. Whereas the courts, as onerous as they may be, essentially achieve the same thing through liability but it is more dynamic, more responsive, and more likely to error correct than the former.
In a free market, if there is a market need for more efficient achievement of redress for wronged parties, the market will produce it.
> Which is but one reason why it is deeply silly to rely on it to make a society go.
But of course relying on governments to achieve redress for wronged parties works just great. Not.
In our current market, many companies have worked around redress of wronged parties by mandating arbitration in various contracts.
> the market will produce it.
Only if it's profitable. Feeding poor people, caring for the indigent, etc. isn't profitable.
Are you confusing markets with business?
To profit means that you accepted a debt instead of getting something in return for your efforts. Business seeks profit because the expectation is that it will pass the debt on to the stakeholders who will then call the debt and get something in return for their efforts.
But it is people who participate in the market. If they demand profit continually, therefore not getting anything in return, that just means they're working for free. People won't feed the poor unless they can do it for free? Methinks that's not what you meant.
Likewise regulation is limited to preventing foreseeable issues, and is often only implemented after somebody suffers damages.
The difference is that regulations are imposed by a third party whose interests may not be aligned with those who are actually involved in the matter. This is good in circumstances where there are externalities, for example just because I'm okay with entering an agreement with a company to use my backyard to store toxic waste doesn't mean my neighbors would be very happy. But when people are making decisions that will only affect themselves, such as what wheelchair to purchase, liability really is the more sensible consumer protection.
Ok, I know we’re assuming electric wheel chairs, we don’t want fires or stuck accelerators, but really? This is still fairly close to literally reinventing the wheel, or adding complexity, a RC car.
It’s pretty sad to think this level of almost Stone Age technology only needs a 10 million dollar investment to bootstrap.
It's really not. If your chair overturns and traps a disabled user, it can be a death sentence for them. If your battery starts burning, your user _might_ _not_ _be_ _able_ to escape the flame.
No, it isn't, because nobody will buy chairs from a company that does that. In a free market, no company can use the get out of jail free card of "but I was following all the regulations". Businesses have to actually meet customer needs.
And in a free market, customers can't delude themselves that Big Brother is looking out for them (even though Big Brother is not actually doing that); they know that they have to enforce quality if that's what they want. That means customers know that it's on them to be savvy enough to be able to evaluate the quality of products and services.
> That's why we have regulation: to establish the minimum standards.
That's what regulators claim, but all history shows that claim to be wrong. The end result of regulations is to reduce the quality and availability of products, not increase them. The wheelchair market described in the article is a classic example: it's regulated up one side and down the other, yet customers can't get simple things like proper footrests.
> Simple medical devices like wheelchairs (Class I or Class II) are also not super over-regulated, you don't need to do clinical trials to certify them.
Doesn't this contradict your claim that regulation is the only way to avoid exploding chairs? If you don't do clinical trials, how do you know the chairs won't explode one day after the warranty expires?
Of course the answer to this is that the regulators just, you know, look at the design of the chairs to evaluate them for certification. But customers could do the same thing for themselves, at less cost (what, you think those government regulators work for free?). So the regulations are actually adding zero value. But they're certainly not adding zero cost.
> All-in-all it'll cost you around $10m, which is not at all a moat.
So you'll be going into the wheelchair business then? Looks like there's plenty of opportunity to out-compete the current incumbents.
Meeting customer needs is optional, what businesses might decide to do instead is change their name once a week on amazon/ebay, hire teams of robots to fake reviews, and then deceive customers into buying doll house furniture at full size prices.
It seems unlikely you are unaware of this type of behavior, so I guess you have an explanation for how an unregulated market in a modern context is supposed to deal with bad actors?
> regulators just, you know, look at the design of the chairs to evaluate them for certification. But customers could do the same thing for themselves, at less cost (what, you think those government regulators work for free?). So the regulations are actually adding zero value. But they're certainly not adding zero cost.
I have little idea how to evaluate the safety of an electric wheelchair, and don't have the time to acquire the expertise to learn how to do that with everything I buy. But we all can chip in and pay someone, who has the expertise, to do it once rather than than millions of people doing it redundantly.
Also, I don't want to live in world of frauds and scams and other crimes, trying to navigate it, for obvious reasons. It's also an economic disaster.
You're doing an awful lot of work to empower already powerful people by removing democratic power over our society.
Yes, what if it does? Unfortunately getting FDA approval isn't going to do anything to prevent that. I fully acknowledge that regulatory bodies are good for dealing with externalities, but consumer protections do not fall under that category.
> Also, I don't want to live in world of frauds and scams and other crimes, trying to navigate it, for obvious reasons
Then, as I said, just stick with the FDA approved products. Government standards would still exist, you'd just have the option to purchase things that didn't meet those standards. The freedom to color outside the lines includes the freedom to color within them. You're not harmed by other people choosing differently.
> It's also an economic disaster.
Citation needed. Typically heavily regulated economies fare worse than those where competition is permitted.
> You're doing an awful lot of work to empower already powerful people by removing democratic power over our society.
We clearly have very different ideas about who holds power in our society.