5 ms·

I’d like to be given the option to. Why should you prevent me a free adult from doing it?

• cygx 6y ago
  Feel free to create or commission all the radioactive toothpaste you want for your personal use. If your jaw starts falling off, as long as you pay for all associated medical costs yourself, that's your business. The game changes if you make it into a product available for and advertised to the general public.
• mjlawson 6y ago
  I feel like you're not acting in good faith here, but I'll bite. I consider it not worth my time to have to be an expert in all things in order to live my daily life. I consider the few overburdensome regulations that occur within a system designed to both protect my health and preserve my time to be a very worthy tradeoff.
  • whb07 6y ago
    I agree with what you’re saying. But you’re proposing the same argument of “well how do you know the dealer didn’t sprinkle another drug on your weed?” What makes you think that the toothpaste company wants to use expensive radioactive materials on your plain toothpaste and not charge you for it?
    • mercer 6y ago
      > I agree with what you’re saying. But you’re proposing the same argument of “well how do you know the dealer didn’t sprinkle another drug on your weed?” Uh, that's an excellent argument for legalizing and regulating weed. Or am I missing your point? > What makes you think that the toothpaste company wants to use expensive radioactive materials on your plain toothpaste and not charge you for it? I'll sell my radioactive toothpaste at a slight loss, capture the market, and then raise prices? Just off the top of my head. Or sell my radioactive stuff and also invest in companies that treat cancer.
      • echaozh 6y ago
        Or just simply sell radioactive toothpaste and advertise it as helping your health. People may fall for that. People even drank disinfectant. Without regulation, there will always people buying your fancy stuff, at a premium even.
• UncleMeat 6y ago
  What choice would you have? If there were no regulations, businesses could lie on packaging. You wouldn’t have the information to make informed choices.
  • apsec112 6y ago
    You could just have a general law banning fraud, rather than regulating every product individually. That's how it was done before the early 20th century.
  • thu2111 6y ago
    There's a distinction here between law and regulation. Even hard core libertarians don't think there should be no laws. That's a straw man. They tend to believe governments should vigorously enforce contracts, trademarks, punish fraud and provide other tools that make commerce easy. In other words that they give people the tools to keep each other honest, but don't try to directly mandate every detail of every product. The word law tends to mean these general, timeless rules that often date back a long way. They don't create ossification or stagnation (Thiel's primary concern) because they don't advantage any particular way of doing things, just enforce fair dealing and honesty. The word regulation tends to be used to mean rather modern and very sector-specific rules, which frequently ossify existing practice and prevent people trying anything new. Often they are nakedly about doing exactly that - taxi medallions are one such form of regulation. The people who support such regulations invariably claim they're about safety or preventing some sort of harm. The evidence for this is highly mixed. It often relies on an absurd, cartoon-character view of companies in which they'll happily kill all their customers to make a quick buck with no concern for long term consequences whatsoever, if the noble and morally pure government employee doesn't step in to stop them. But there are plenty of cases where regulations seem to have created more harm than good, and vastly more where it's ambiguous. Do we really need governments to regulate the taxi industry, for example? Arguably not. It seems Uber is widely judged as being a better taxi regulator than the government, as it can use far faster and more plentiful feedback vs the paper or faxed complaint forms governments typically provide. Libertarians often make arguments of this form - that the alternative to government regulations is not some anarchist wild west in which people go mad murdering each other with explosive contraptions. The alternative is private sector regulation of various kinds, in which logos and trademarks are used to establish meaning behind a mark and consumers gravitate to products that have those marks, as they're understood to be a sign of quality and safety. The advantage being that if that organisation succumbs to various kinds of dysfunction, like capture, or stagnation, then another can come along and outcompete it. Whereas with government regulators that can't happen - you can get endless decades or even centuries of unfixable dysfunction.