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Comment by mbroshi | Hacker News Reader

Or, to sum up even more succinctly:

- Government regulations have stifled innovation, thereby making existing products less safe, less comfortable, and less used than they would be otherwise.

In other words, nothing new.

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There's some truth to this, but your tone makes it a little hard to spot.

I'm not sure that the article provides much support for the broad claim, implied by your comment, that government regulation is always a bad idea, or that the government should get out of the condom regulation business. I for one think it's a pretty good idea for a regulator to ensure that condoms (like other health-related products) perform up to some minimum standard. The social impact of sub-standard products is too significant to leave to the market and there is good reason to think that the market would not adequately communicate the signals that consumers need in order to make rational condom-purchasing decisions in the absence of regulation.

I agree with your narrower claim that the existing condom regulations seem to be badly in need of reform. But I'm not at all convinced that they are worse than having no regulations at all.

> Government regulations have stifled innovation, thereby making existing products less safe, less comfortable, and less used than they would be otherwise.

The article implied this in tone, but in facts reported within did not make a slam dunk case. Latex is probably significantly safer in terms of blocking STD transmission, and it's also heavily understudied whether or not the sizing differences matter. I wouldn't say it's obvious government regulation is really the devil here.

That doesn't explain why the innovation didn't happen in, say Somalia, where there are no government regulations to speak of.

The situation in Somalia can be readily explained by low incomes and decades of violence.

Which in turn can readily be explained by the lack of a strong government.

Can it? On what do you base that opinion? What particular facts from the modern history of Somalia have you used to support it?

The fact that it's currently in a state of near anarchy and has been for a while.

That's not an explanation, that's restating the fact.

Your comment was ambiguous. I thought you were asking me for the basis of my claim that Somalia lacks a strong government. If you think the civil war doesn't have anything to do with Somalia's current problems, I'm open to being persuaded.

The civil war and the lack of a strong government are not the same. It's the former, and not the latter, which maintains them in poverty.

A civil war happens precisely because there is no strong government. It's completely bizarre to claim that there's no link between the two.

How do you explain the improvements that have occurred since the collapse of Barre's regime? That seems to indicate that anarchy cannot be blamed for the poor conditions in Somalia compared to, say, wealthy Western nations.

I'm not defending the hypothesis that any government is better than no government. So sure, having a really really bad government could be worse for Somalia than having none at all.

That's a pretty facile response. Lots of African countries with "strong" governments still have tons and tons of violence.

Somalia went through a civil war in recent history. That's about the best possible example of violence caused by the lack of a strong government. Of course, violence can occur for other reasons too, so merely having a strong government is no guarantee of its absence.

I presume you know very little about Somalia's recent history. It had a strong government from 1969 to 1991. It was a military dictatorship with a centrally planned economy ("scientific socialism"). After the regime's collapse in 1991, Somalia was essentially stateless, and there was dispersed fighting between various groups for control of various areas of Somalia. Yet, perhaps surprisingly to many people, it's not clear that things were worse under "anarchy" than under Barre's regime. For instance, life expectancy improved dramatically, as did access to health care and technology.

You appear to be confusing strength with brutality. The military dictatorship was not strong. That’s why it collapsed. In general, dictatorships tend to be weak and unstable in comparison to more democratic forms of government.

I'm not confusing the two. The government was brutal, and it was also strong. It censored the media. It nationalized all major industries. It carried out large scale terror campaigns against political dissidents and Somali clans. It suppressed civil liberties on a very wide scale.

Right, because Somalia has never had a government, or the lack thereof today has nothing to do with the previous government.

We really are going down the libertarian rabbit hole when even the absence of government is blamed on government.

I'm not trying to paint all governments with the same brush. I'm just saying that, perhaps, you don't know anything about Somalia and are just using it as a strawman against small government.

edit: it's one, single country that has had a very violent history, not a case study in deregulation of markets.

I didn’t say anything about small government or market deregulation. Small vs large is orthogonal to strong vs. weak.

You don't have to be libertarian to recognize that Barre's military dictatorship was not an example of a good government. From Wikipedia:

> The United Nations Development Programme stated that "the 21-year regime of Siyad Barre had one of the worst human rights records in Africa."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siad_Barre#Human_rights_abuse_a...

...And an abundance of strong governments who are willing to fund various factions to kill other various factions to fight a proxy war over natural resources.

That's why they don't have an industry there. But any western manufacturer could go to some lightly-regulated place, start handing out Better Condoms (tm) like candy, and then point to major improvements in user satisfaction, disease transmission rates, and so on in order to create pressure for a more careful evaluation in other markets like the US or EU.

Think back to news you've read about the deployment of improved mosquito netting and the like, which is tried out in Africa because that's where the greatest need exists.

But if there's no government intervention, then why are incomes so low, and why is there so much violence?

After the collapse of the Somali Democratic Republic in 1991, incomes increased and violence decreased.

...which means they will need children and are not focused on prevention technology

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