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If the private sector was in control we would still have leaded petrol in cars.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
And cigarette ads on TV, designed for children, etc.
pas 5y ago
Was the private sector really in control though? - asks the libertarian devil's advocate. On one hand, "yeah prohibiting bad things is good, duh", on the other hand bad policies prevents building affordable walkable high density neighborhoods, providing cheaper medical care, providing certain services like hair braiding, and so on. There's an optimal path in this. No need to resort to absurd counterfactuals. The root of the problem is that society and the people themselves are inconsistent. Their stated preferences don't match their actual preferences revealed through their actions. (Of course a big part of that is simply the bounds on human rationality. We are easily misled by our own biases, naive, exploited through emotional pressure, gullible, etc. Plus on top of all this we have problems with consuming the relevant information sources, filtering and processing the firehose of the Internet.) There's no consistent preference from society for tolerating this and this amount of risks and harms in exchange for cheaper gas. Most people don't even think of these as a complex interconnected inseparable thing. They just want to "ban lead" or have a "small government" and so on. The public-private separation makes sense in some contexts, but the line is not clear, and when it comes to politics there's almost no separation. It's about equity and oppression. History is full of examples of shifting preferences and increased equity and decreased oppression. (Monarchies, slavery, universal suffrage, gay marriage ... society as a whole changed its mind about these. [Yes, of course, there are reactionaries all the time, and there's no universal law that says that these changes can't be reversed or never will change back somehow.]) It's not about public or private, it's about who benefits and who gets exploited. Both the "everything is publicly owned and controlled" Stalinist USSR (and Maoist China) and the privately owned United Fruit (and both the Dutch and the British East India companies) committed crimes against humanity on an unimaginable scale (all while "democracy was booming" in both the Dutch and British societies.)

And cigarette ads on TV, designed for children, etc.

pas 5y ago

Was the private sector really in control though? - asks the libertarian devil's advocate. On one hand, "yeah prohibiting bad things is good, duh", on the other hand bad policies prevents building affordable walkable high density neighborhoods, providing cheaper medical care, providing certain services like hair braiding, and so on. There's an optimal path in this. No need to resort to absurd counterfactuals. The root of the problem is that society and the people themselves are inconsistent. Their stated preferences don't match their actual preferences revealed through their actions. (Of course a big part of that is simply the bounds on human rationality. We are easily misled by our own biases, naive, exploited through emotional pressure, gullible, etc. Plus on top of all this we have problems with consuming the relevant information sources, filtering and processing the firehose of the Internet.) There's no consistent preference from society for tolerating this and this amount of risks and harms in exchange for cheaper gas. Most people don't even think of these as a complex interconnected inseparable thing. They just want to "ban lead" or have a "small government" and so on. The public-private separation makes sense in some contexts, but the line is not clear, and when it comes to politics there's almost no separation. It's about equity and oppression. History is full of examples of shifting preferences and increased equity and decreased oppression. (Monarchies, slavery, universal suffrage, gay marriage ... society as a whole changed its mind about these. [Yes, of course, there are reactionaries all the time, and there's no universal law that says that these changes can't be reversed or never will change back somehow.]) It's not about public or private, it's about who benefits and who gets exploited. Both the "everything is publicly owned and controlled" Stalinist USSR (and Maoist China) and the privately owned United Fruit (and both the Dutch and the British East India companies) committed crimes against humanity on an unimaginable scale (all while "democracy was booming" in both the Dutch and British societies.)