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Online debate of 'regulation' seems to rapidly, if not instantaneously, settle into this false ping-pong between "regulation is evil" and "regulation is require
by gwright 11y ago
Online debate of 'regulation' seems to rapidly, if not instantaneously, settle into this false ping-pong between "regulation is evil" and "regulation is required to save the children".
If you have ever run a business, you would understand that the problem isn't the type of constraints you list here but instead is the endless number of ill-conceived, ill-defined, and just plain dumb regulations that are more often about protecting a special interest than in protecting individuals.
The net effect of the monotonically increasing complexity of regulation is that the government has more and more power to control our economic activity. Is it any wonder that special interests spend enormous amounts of money to influence this process?
- SixSigma 11y agoI have run my own business so it is rather impertinent for you to take some higher "I know better than you" ground. The purpose of government and therefore regulation is to control externalities. That some regulations are bad is not the fault of the concept of regulation; it is the failure of your government structure.
- gwright 11y agoI apologize for my impertinence, it seems to have distracted you such that you missed the point that I was making that regulations are neither an absolute good nor an absolute evil (despite what you read on the Internet). Using extreme examples in either direction to argue in favor of the other extreme doesn't convince anyone of any thing. There are lots of theories of government. Controlling externalities is really a special case of protecting individual rights, which is the role of government from my point of view. I'm not sure what is or isn't in your definition of 'government structure'. I was trying to point out that to the extent that we support an expansive scope of government regulation we create a situation where it is completely rational for people and organizations to expend considerable amounts of time and money to influence that process. If instead we support a limited scope of government regulation that diminishes the pressure to influence regulations.