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As per inserting words into your mouth, I addressed your argument, not you. Regarding my post as if it were a personal attack is a disservice. I don't follow y

As per inserting words into your mouth, I addressed your argument, not you. Regarding my post as if it were a personal attack is a disservice. I don't follow your point about it being obvious that businesses will, left to themselves, put their customers in harm's way. Left to themselves businesses will do what maximizes profits. The behaviors that maximize profit are determined by the demand established by consumers. When consumers are unwilling to pay a premium for safety, then businesses will not provide safe products. Thus it is consumers, in their uninformed quest to maximize utility, that are hurting themselves. Consumers need better information so they can make better decisions, as it stands they are making a flawed choice (assuming that safety is indeed worth more than we currently pay for it). On the other hand, businesses are making the only rational decision available by continuing to produce unsafe products for customers who won't adequately compensate companies for safer products. Your certification mandates an additional cost on business, one that customers are currently unwilling to pay for, and thus fulfills the role of taxation, which--if we are going to buy into the free economy myth--will result in lower overall utility: for both customers and businesses.

raganwald 19y ago
By your argument, we should abolish laws regulating workplace safety, product safety, and pollution control. All of these things could be enforced by consumer demand, but they are not. All of these things impose a cost on business, driving up prices. There is room for believing that the free market should be unfettered to the point that businesses can be left to choose what level of safety to provide for workers, left to choose whether to make safe products, and left to choose whether to pollute our environment. If you believe that, I think we differ at some axiomatic level, not a logical level. I know that businesses are making "rational" decisions. But just because it "maximizes their utility" doesn't mean I want them to do it. Enron was rational. Why do we pass laws against its behaviour? Why can't we leave it to the marketplace to choose where to invest? Again, this is a deep, axiomatic issue. If you are fundamentally against a regulated environment, I understand your view without agreement.
- willarson 19y ago
  Consumers will buy the products that grant them the most utility. Workers have resources to create the environment such that safe workplaces create products with higher utility (by striking in unsafe environments, demanding higher pay in unsafe environments). Thus workplace safety can be, and is, enforced by consumer demand. Product safety is indeed regulated by consumer demand. People who value safety purchase safer cars, and safer cars exist to be purchased. When contact solution of a certain brand was found to be contaminated earlier this year, people stopped using it, even before the findings were certain. This is because the expected utility of using the product had fallen compared to that of other brands, and thus it was no longer worth its price. Pollution control is similar to safety. People are willing to pay a premium for less polluting alternatives. Look at Google scrambling to declare itself a green entity. Look at the resurgence of locally grown food (which consumes less fuel in transport), but often costs more. There are real market forces exerting pressure upon businesses to provide less polluting services. It isn't clear that regulatory forces are being very successful (among other examples, Kyoto Protocol has failed miserably to achieve a meaningful shift). Enron wasn't rational, as evidenced by committing wide-scale fraud. They were in a euphoric panic, simultaneously high off of their success and panicked that they could not maintain it. Their cavalier disregard to legality and honesty destroyed their company, and even without a governmental body to enforce regulations it seems inevitable that the gathering weight of their deception would have swallowed them whole. They pretended to have resources that didn't exist, and eventually consumers would have been awakened to this truth via a catastrophic failure of one sort or another: the existing government regulation certainly did nothing to curtail the financial pandemic that Enron's bloated corpse transmitted to America's economy. You have a solid point, that we often don't like which actions are rewarded in life, and that it often seems like government regulation can improve on the allotments of resources: that an organization can compensate for the flawed actions of humans. This is why we now have organizations (UN) that supervise organizations (countries) that supervise organizations (pronvinces) that supervise organizations (municipal districts), that supervise people. I always thought the idea was to build layers of abstraction on top of working components. Somehow stacking layers of flawed implementations has always seemed to magnify and obfuscate flaws rather than compensate for them.

raganwald 19y ago

By your argument, we should abolish laws regulating workplace safety, product safety, and pollution control. All of these things could be enforced by consumer demand, but they are not. All of these things impose a cost on business, driving up prices. There is room for believing that the free market should be unfettered to the point that businesses can be left to choose what level of safety to provide for workers, left to choose whether to make safe products, and left to choose whether to pollute our environment. If you believe that, I think we differ at some axiomatic level, not a logical level. I know that businesses are making "rational" decisions. But just because it "maximizes their utility" doesn't mean I want them to do it. Enron was rational. Why do we pass laws against its behaviour? Why can't we leave it to the marketplace to choose where to invest? Again, this is a deep, axiomatic issue. If you are fundamentally against a regulated environment, I understand your view without agreement.

willarson 19y ago
Consumers will buy the products that grant them the most utility. Workers have resources to create the environment such that safe workplaces create products with higher utility (by striking in unsafe environments, demanding higher pay in unsafe environments). Thus workplace safety can be, and is, enforced by consumer demand. Product safety is indeed regulated by consumer demand. People who value safety purchase safer cars, and safer cars exist to be purchased. When contact solution of a certain brand was found to be contaminated earlier this year, people stopped using it, even before the findings were certain. This is because the expected utility of using the product had fallen compared to that of other brands, and thus it was no longer worth its price. Pollution control is similar to safety. People are willing to pay a premium for less polluting alternatives. Look at Google scrambling to declare itself a green entity. Look at the resurgence of locally grown food (which consumes less fuel in transport), but often costs more. There are real market forces exerting pressure upon businesses to provide less polluting services. It isn't clear that regulatory forces are being very successful (among other examples, Kyoto Protocol has failed miserably to achieve a meaningful shift). Enron wasn't rational, as evidenced by committing wide-scale fraud. They were in a euphoric panic, simultaneously high off of their success and panicked that they could not maintain it. Their cavalier disregard to legality and honesty destroyed their company, and even without a governmental body to enforce regulations it seems inevitable that the gathering weight of their deception would have swallowed them whole. They pretended to have resources that didn't exist, and eventually consumers would have been awakened to this truth via a catastrophic failure of one sort or another: the existing government regulation certainly did nothing to curtail the financial pandemic that Enron's bloated corpse transmitted to America's economy. You have a solid point, that we often don't like which actions are rewarded in life, and that it often seems like government regulation can improve on the allotments of resources: that an organization can compensate for the flawed actions of humans. This is why we now have organizations (UN) that supervise organizations (countries) that supervise organizations (pronvinces) that supervise organizations (municipal districts), that supervise people. I always thought the idea was to build layers of abstraction on top of working components. Somehow stacking layers of flawed implementations has always seemed to magnify and obfuscate flaws rather than compensate for them.