And this is why regulation is always harmful for the consumer.
Oh yeah. It isn't.
Regulation can solve many more ills than it can cause.
Now that would be helpful. But sure, you can just move elsewhere. It's going to be easy selling your old house given that there is no clean water available.
Edit: As a bonus, health insurance companies should deny you coverage because you live in a high risk area.
I wish people would stop using this phrase to mean "I can invent a chain of reasoning which leads to your conclusion and also to this ridiculous conclusion, but has no resemblance to any premise you've actually stated, and I'd like to pretend that that chain of reasoning was yours".
Sure, if you further assume the premise that "people who belong to a class that are demonstrably bad at evalauting long-term risk should not be allowed to vote".
Of course, that's not a premise that was raised, or is even directly relevant to the argument made in, scott_s's post upthread. It's, at best, a premise that is extremely loosely analogous to something one might reasonably interpret as an implied premise of scott_s's argument, but if you want to argue against scott_s's argument it would be better to address it directly rather than by trying to pretend that the conclusion of a chain of requiring a premise which is, at best, loosely analogous to something that might be an implicit premise of his proceeds from "the same logic" as his argument.
Do you have the ability to make sure that every single piece of food you purchase is safe for human consumption?
Who's going to create those agencies? In your advocated system the companies being investigated are the ones more likely to make the agencies than outside individuals because their isn't enough incentive to enter that market. Especially because without regulation companies can decide to open their facilities to agencies that are on good terms with the companies in question.
The problem you have is that you can't see a situation where people aren't consumers, and where the acquisition of wealth isn't the only goal of everyone. The problem is that the current system encourages corporations instead of cooperatives.
Treating humanity like a collection of profit-maximizing individualists means the only possible solution to you is more competition. Were humanity only a collection of profit-maximizing individualists we'd still be uneducated cavemen. Society moves forwards because it realizes that it needs to work together.
Did the Great Depression occur because of too much governmental power? Did the 2008 crash occur because of too much regulation?
Then what are you arguing for? My understanding is that you say free market cannot be better than having some degree of regulation. Regulation assumes government, doesn't it?
If you take even a tiny look at the rest of what I had to say (which you also neglected to respond to) my argument is collectivization, which is not the same thing as centralization.
(I saw your comment and questions above, in the other thread, but I cannot answer them until I understand this one better).
Additionally, and I've said it before, replace corporations with cooperatives. This is the more important part, you need to get rid of the idea that an individual can exist without society and outside of society. If everyone thought that individual wealth and profit-maximizing were the most important things higher education (and most education) along with a host of other institutions and almost every social institution wouldn't exist. And while I understand that a good deal of people are arguing against social institutions, they forget that wouldn't have received the same education they did.
If everyone was wealth-maximizing most professors wouldn't be professors because they're able to make more working in private industry. The same is equally true for a large number of public educators, at least in the hard sciences.
Education is considered a great equalizer. Society cannot get better if we privatize education, meaning only the rich can afford high quality education (and this is a problem that America is experiencing today). If only the upper classes can pay for high quality education the education gap widens, and it becomes nigh impossible for someone to be upwardly mobile.
And that's where my main problem with the American Libertarian movement, privatizing everything can at best keep society stagnant.
The answer to your question is competition. If a consumer protection agency wants my money, it has to earn my trust and be better than its competitors.
If no consumer protection agency earns anyone's trust, how does it continue to exist in your perfect world?
On a related note: what incentive is there for an individual to create a consumer protection agency? What incentive is there for a company to open their doors to a consumer protection agency that isn't going to give them a good rating?
Being paid by people who would like a reliable information about the products and services they purchase?
> What incentive is there for a company to open their doors to a consumer protection agency that isn't going to give them a good rating?
Being excluded from the rating altogether to the advantage of their competitors?
What's to keep an entire industry from creating their own protection agency, and excluding all other agencies from inspecting their facilities? Who protects the consumers then?
Without regulation what's to keep an agency from intermixing legitimate ratings with false ratings? What's to keep a company from paying every agency for false ratings, especially if everyone is profit-maximizing, and every other agency is going to say the same thing? Even if you found out, what can you do about it?
Does being excluded from the ratings give an advantage to their competitors? All it says is that they weren't rated, not that they're better or worse, and what if their competitors are terribly rated?
What's to keep an agency from being vindictive? This goes with the above mixing legitimate and false ratings.
What happens to a politician if he doesn't keep his promise or if an agency doesn't perform as it should? Nothing. A politician keeps his office until the next election and the agency stays in business, possibly with the very same people in charge of it. Can I stop paying taxes? No. I go to jail if I do.
The magic isn't the ability to determine whether something is safe; the magic, insofar as there is anything like that involved, is that government is the vehicle empowered by the people to do something about it once it has made the determination.
Regulation with the intention of saving lives is not a bad thing. I doubt anybody would say we should abolish driving laws and driver's license requirements because they're "regulations that limit innovation." Saying we should have safe drinking water in no way limits innovation or freedom either, yet some people seem to think we need to scrap this.
But why does this mean it should be able to shut down programming schools?
Regulation of post-secondary educations programs, be they "game design", "communications", or "hacker" schools, is a a reasonable idea.
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/06/24/ontario-investi...
Days later, the Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities Brad Duguid got involved and let the program continue under a careful watch, after some restructuring.
http://readwrite.com/2013/07/03/canadian-coding-camp-bitmake...