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I disagree with the premise that regulations are necessary. They're bandage patch solutions. Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical

I disagree with the premise that regulations are necessary. They're bandage patch solutions. Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical schools by imposing ridiculous requirements is not going to make better surgeons; it will mostly just drive up prices like in the US. About food regulations; if a product uses dangerous chemicals (for example), in a proper free market, that should give alternative products a competitive advantage. The problem is not lack of regulations; it's the lack of a free market and free exchange of information. Regulations exist to prevent abuse. If companies couldn't get away with abusing their customers (without going bankrupt), we wouldn't need regulations in the first place. In any case, large corporations which essentially have immunity from the law usually find clever ways to work around the regulations without fixing the underlying problem. A better solution would be to stop propping up big corporations with infinite fiat currency; big corporations are riddled with blind spots and they are devoid of any sense of accountability due to inherent flaws in the concept of corporate personhood; big corporations are not meant to exist and they wouldn't exist if not for all that free fiat which is creating an artificial anti-competitive moat around them. Competition and churn is necessary for a proper functioning capitalist system. Our current monetary system is all about propping up zombie corporations by giving them unlimited free money which allows them to get away with everything. The way our economy works now is basically like a son who is CEO and who keeps getting caught doing drugs and getting in trouble and then rich daddy keeps bailing them out over and over again and then bribing journalists to keep quiet so that nobody finds out... Regulations are the equivalent of sending the son to rehab; except it's all a PR stunt and the son will be back to doing drugs and causing problems within a few weeks. The solution is to fire the spoiled brat and let someone else do the job; someone who is passionate about it and can do it right. Supply-side economics have distorted the way people think about the economy. Instead of figuring out what consumers need and working backwards from that, companies are constantly trying to figure out how to use up all available resources (e.g. capital, people, raw materials) and then resorting to advertising to convince consumers that they need whatever it is that they ended up producing. It's madness. All the talk about 'product-market fit' is delusional; it's mostly about fitting the customer to the product than the other way around. Advertising and A/B testing is not about improving the product to fit the user, it's about manipulating the user to buy the product.

14u2c 6y ago
> Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical schools by imposing ridiculous requirements is not going to make better surgeons; it will mostly just drive up prices like in the US. This is largely untrue. A recent debate: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k2ofqw/the_american_medical_association_acts_a_bit_like/gdwjzwg/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k2ofqw/the_a...
- cryptica 6y ago
  This doesn't prove anything. One can always cherry-pick and refute certain peripheral points but that doesn't address the core premise of the argument. The only way to disprove such argument wold be exhaustively and that is simply not possible. For example, just off the top of my head, I can think of one aspect which was not mentioned; the number of years of training that are required to become a doctor; this is in itself a limiting factor which reduces the number of applicants and therefore graduates. Do doctors need so many years of training; who decides that? Maybe they could specialize sooner and still yield excellent results? Another aspect would be cost; it's likely that the high costs of education themselves are limiting the number of applicants. Unfortunately, these types of debates are always going to end up being a case of trusting authority versus trusting your own critical thinking (and common sense). Showing a bunch of arbitrary data doesn't mean anything unless you can prove that all the relevant aspects have been covered exhaustively and this never happens in practice. In practice, the main use of data is to lend credence to profitable narratives. The foundation of our modern economy is to draw attention towards convenient facts and suppress inconvenient ones even when both are true and equally relevant.
ryukafalz 6y ago
> About food regulations; if a product uses dangerous chemicals (for example), in a proper free market, that should give alternative products a competitive advantage. The problem is not lack of regulations; it's the lack of a free market and free exchange of information. Absent regulation, how do you expect consumers to know about chemicals used in the product? We didn't get those nutrition facts and ingredients labels out of the grace of the manufacturers.

14u2c 6y ago

> Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical schools by imposing ridiculous requirements is not going to make better surgeons; it will mostly just drive up prices like in the US. This is largely untrue. A recent debate: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k2ofqw/the_american_medical_association_acts_a_bit_like/gdwjzwg/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k2ofqw/the_a...

cryptica 6y ago
This doesn't prove anything. One can always cherry-pick and refute certain peripheral points but that doesn't address the core premise of the argument. The only way to disprove such argument wold be exhaustively and that is simply not possible. For example, just off the top of my head, I can think of one aspect which was not mentioned; the number of years of training that are required to become a doctor; this is in itself a limiting factor which reduces the number of applicants and therefore graduates. Do doctors need so many years of training; who decides that? Maybe they could specialize sooner and still yield excellent results? Another aspect would be cost; it's likely that the high costs of education themselves are limiting the number of applicants. Unfortunately, these types of debates are always going to end up being a case of trusting authority versus trusting your own critical thinking (and common sense). Showing a bunch of arbitrary data doesn't mean anything unless you can prove that all the relevant aspects have been covered exhaustively and this never happens in practice. In practice, the main use of data is to lend credence to profitable narratives. The foundation of our modern economy is to draw attention towards convenient facts and suppress inconvenient ones even when both are true and equally relevant.

ryukafalz 6y ago

> About food regulations; if a product uses dangerous chemicals (for example), in a proper free market, that should give alternative products a competitive advantage. The problem is not lack of regulations; it's the lack of a free market and free exchange of information. Absent regulation, how do you expect consumers to know about chemicals used in the product? We didn't get those nutrition facts and ingredients labels out of the grace of the manufacturers.