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I absolutely agree. When you remove government actors from industry, except where absolutely needed (e.g., preventing monopoly) this becomes the default modus

I absolutely agree. When you remove government actors from industry, except where absolutely needed (e.g., preventing monopoly) this becomes the default modus operandi.

slg 8y ago
This is a pretty ludicrous statement. We wouldn't need any consumer protection laws, anti-fraud laws, or a really a majority of business law if the default modus operandi was pro-consumer. The reason Apple is different here is because their financial incentive aligns with the consumer. That is not the case with many businesses regardless of government involvement.
keiyakins 8y ago
That's why we never had to do anything to address rampant fraud, cutting food with dangerous materials, straight up lying about what you're selling, con artists, snake oil salesmen, or irresponsible management of hazardous waste, right?
- dmix 8y ago
  Not that I support the OPs absolutist statement, but courts could and do handle quite a few of those (I mean fraud is handled almost entirely by the courts). Especially if the effort over the last century was put into strengthening the law and property rights, instead of creating endless agencies, government economic power brokers, and pre-emptive hoops for companies to jump through, which encourage state-backed oligopolies to flourish at the expense of competition and any firm small enough to not afford a team of lawyers. Not to mention measuring efficacy and ROI on each individual agency involved in market intervention is largely absent once the agencies are in place. Unless you're conflating 'removing government actors' as completely removing the justice system and law enforcement? Which are two things which libertarians are very much in support of being government responsibility...Smaller government != no government.
  - keiyakins 8y ago
    On what grounds? Caveat emptor was the rule for a long, long time. It was only later when regulation and standards started coming into play that it was a thing. The courts can't just declare a legal thing to be bad.
  - simonh 8y ago
    Laws are regulations, the courts you’re praising didn’t pull the laws they enforced out of their asses. If you remove government agencies specialised in regulating specific domains, then that responsibility will just fall on general law enforcement or just go unenforced. Of course there are costs to any system of regulation, but most consumer regulation is there to prevent companies doing things some of them absolutely did. Busses in London used to have “no spitting” signs. Now they don’t. Why the change? In general you regulate because hard earned experience shows you have to, not because you just feel like it. If regulations become unnecessary, ok it’s time to revisit it, but managing this stuff is what we elect people for.
  - xenadu02 8y ago
    You can only be libertarian if a) you've never bothered to study history or b) it's a cover story for an ulterior motive. The US was mostly a libertarian's paradise from 1850-1950. It didn't work. Federal agencies and government regulations were created because the courts were unable to adequately respond to ongoing problems. The proximate cause of death for libertarianism was the sequence of massive bank panics and depressions leading up to the final "Great Depression" in 1929, but there were many causes across wide-ranging areas of society. To give just one example: The FDA was created (and later strengthened) in response to a long succession of disasters where well-established drug companies added known toxic (or lethal!) chemicals to their drugs, then placed them on the market without testing. Thousands of people were killed. No legal decision can bring back the dead. Most of these companies already had reputations to protect and judgements against them were expensive. Yet they continued to screw up royally. We've tried libertarianism. It simply doesn't work. It has never worked. It will never work. It is always less efficient to force millions of consumers to extensively research every aspect of the products they buy, then seek redress in the courts after suffering injury. It will always be a net win to set basic safety standards (for established product categories) and force manufacturers to follow the standards. If you're a rich oligarch who hates paying taxes then libertarianism is a convenient excuse to shrink government (regulations = expense) and/or foist as much of the tax burden onto others as possible. Libertarianism is also attractive to people who have grown up in a sheltered society and so see regulations and standards as unnecessary restraints. They don't have any basis for comparison. It's similar to anti-vaxxers: Vaccines were so successful that whole generations have grown up without watching their kids or friends die and be crippled by disease, so they don't value vaccines any more than they value oxygen in the air. For that matter it is the same as the current Boomer generation's FYGM attitude: growing up in a post-war boom when the effective wage was ~$18/hr and college cost 1/4 as much of course it was easy to work part time while getting your degree. And with a growing population and society of course there will be plenty of jobs waiting for you. Like oxygen in the air or water in the sea such conditions are completely beneath their notice and thus later generations "must" be lazy moochers and "of course" they should just "work hard like I did". Sometimes I think humans really are doomed. As a society every time we get a good thing going we completely forget the toil, blood, sweat, and tears required to get there.
simonh 8y ago
My wife is Chinese and we go there quite often. Regulation of consumer goods and services is very light and easily circumvented, and as a result the consumer market is a cesspit of shoddy, dangerous products and deceptive practices. Its so bad one of the most prized gifts you can take there is baby formula powder, because the local versions have frequently been found to be cut with dangerous chemicals. I’ve seen and have family with experience of a deregulated market and it’s not at all pretty. Individual consumers just don’t have the resources to deal equally with big companies that have no reason to care about consumer interests, without the ability to exercise their collective power - which is what a representative government is.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  that is clearly an issue with the lack of political freedom, not just regulations.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    Political freedom alone won't solve tainted milk in China. People don't have the time or energy to audit every food product they purchase, establishing minimum standards to prevent death or injury from harmful food is one of the least costly ways to deal with the root issue.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      Political freedom can lead to elect officials who care about such issues and take actual measures to create and enforce regulations instead of the current ones doing nothing or accepting bribes. A monopoly on politics is not optimal.
      - EADGBE 8y ago
        I don't see the FDA being disassembled anytime soon. Hopefully.
Spooky23 8y ago
I think crypto currency is the best example of what happens in a wild west, unregulated market -- lots of fraud and instability.
- feedmeseymour 8y ago
  Yeah, and look what a failure crypto currency has become… Combined crypto currency market capitalization is currently nearing 1% of the market capitalization of the entire planet. IOW, great thesis.

I absolutely agree. When you remove government actors from industry, except where absolutely needed (e.g., preventing monopoly) this becomes the default modus operandi.

slg 8y ago

This is a pretty ludicrous statement. We wouldn't need any consumer protection laws, anti-fraud laws, or a really a majority of business law if the default modus operandi was pro-consumer. The reason Apple is different here is because their financial incentive aligns with the consumer. That is not the case with many businesses regardless of government involvement.

keiyakins 8y ago

That's why we never had to do anything to address rampant fraud, cutting food with dangerous materials, straight up lying about what you're selling, con artists, snake oil salesmen, or irresponsible management of hazardous waste, right?

dmix 8y ago
Not that I support the OPs absolutist statement, but courts could and do handle quite a few of those (I mean fraud is handled almost entirely by the courts). Especially if the effort over the last century was put into strengthening the law and property rights, instead of creating endless agencies, government economic power brokers, and pre-emptive hoops for companies to jump through, which encourage state-backed oligopolies to flourish at the expense of competition and any firm small enough to not afford a team of lawyers. Not to mention measuring efficacy and ROI on each individual agency involved in market intervention is largely absent once the agencies are in place. Unless you're conflating 'removing government actors' as completely removing the justice system and law enforcement? Which are two things which libertarians are very much in support of being government responsibility...Smaller government != no government.
- keiyakins 8y ago
  On what grounds? Caveat emptor was the rule for a long, long time. It was only later when regulation and standards started coming into play that it was a thing. The courts can't just declare a legal thing to be bad.
- simonh 8y ago
  Laws are regulations, the courts you’re praising didn’t pull the laws they enforced out of their asses. If you remove government agencies specialised in regulating specific domains, then that responsibility will just fall on general law enforcement or just go unenforced. Of course there are costs to any system of regulation, but most consumer regulation is there to prevent companies doing things some of them absolutely did. Busses in London used to have “no spitting” signs. Now they don’t. Why the change? In general you regulate because hard earned experience shows you have to, not because you just feel like it. If regulations become unnecessary, ok it’s time to revisit it, but managing this stuff is what we elect people for.
- xenadu02 8y ago
  You can only be libertarian if a) you've never bothered to study history or b) it's a cover story for an ulterior motive. The US was mostly a libertarian's paradise from 1850-1950. It didn't work. Federal agencies and government regulations were created because the courts were unable to adequately respond to ongoing problems. The proximate cause of death for libertarianism was the sequence of massive bank panics and depressions leading up to the final "Great Depression" in 1929, but there were many causes across wide-ranging areas of society. To give just one example: The FDA was created (and later strengthened) in response to a long succession of disasters where well-established drug companies added known toxic (or lethal!) chemicals to their drugs, then placed them on the market without testing. Thousands of people were killed. No legal decision can bring back the dead. Most of these companies already had reputations to protect and judgements against them were expensive. Yet they continued to screw up royally. We've tried libertarianism. It simply doesn't work. It has never worked. It will never work. It is always less efficient to force millions of consumers to extensively research every aspect of the products they buy, then seek redress in the courts after suffering injury. It will always be a net win to set basic safety standards (for established product categories) and force manufacturers to follow the standards. If you're a rich oligarch who hates paying taxes then libertarianism is a convenient excuse to shrink government (regulations = expense) and/or foist as much of the tax burden onto others as possible. Libertarianism is also attractive to people who have grown up in a sheltered society and so see regulations and standards as unnecessary restraints. They don't have any basis for comparison. It's similar to anti-vaxxers: Vaccines were so successful that whole generations have grown up without watching their kids or friends die and be crippled by disease, so they don't value vaccines any more than they value oxygen in the air. For that matter it is the same as the current Boomer generation's FYGM attitude: growing up in a post-war boom when the effective wage was ~$18/hr and college cost 1/4 as much of course it was easy to work part time while getting your degree. And with a growing population and society of course there will be plenty of jobs waiting for you. Like oxygen in the air or water in the sea such conditions are completely beneath their notice and thus later generations "must" be lazy moochers and "of course" they should just "work hard like I did". Sometimes I think humans really are doomed. As a society every time we get a good thing going we completely forget the toil, blood, sweat, and tears required to get there.

simonh 8y ago

My wife is Chinese and we go there quite often. Regulation of consumer goods and services is very light and easily circumvented, and as a result the consumer market is a cesspit of shoddy, dangerous products and deceptive practices. Its so bad one of the most prized gifts you can take there is baby formula powder, because the local versions have frequently been found to be cut with dangerous chemicals. I’ve seen and have family with experience of a deregulated market and it’s not at all pretty. Individual consumers just don’t have the resources to deal equally with big companies that have no reason to care about consumer interests, without the ability to exercise their collective power - which is what a representative government is.

ekianjo 8y ago
that is clearly an issue with the lack of political freedom, not just regulations.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  Political freedom alone won't solve tainted milk in China. People don't have the time or energy to audit every food product they purchase, establishing minimum standards to prevent death or injury from harmful food is one of the least costly ways to deal with the root issue.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    Political freedom can lead to elect officials who care about such issues and take actual measures to create and enforce regulations instead of the current ones doing nothing or accepting bribes. A monopoly on politics is not optimal.
    - EADGBE 8y ago
      I don't see the FDA being disassembled anytime soon. Hopefully.

Spooky23 8y ago

I think crypto currency is the best example of what happens in a wild west, unregulated market -- lots of fraud and instability.

feedmeseymour 8y ago
Yeah, and look what a failure crypto currency has become… Combined crypto currency market capitalization is currently nearing 1% of the market capitalization of the entire planet. IOW, great thesis.