5 ms·

There is no magic solution to the "problem" of "how to dictate rules to a large society that will keep things smooth and productive". The problem is fundamental

by pdonis 5mo ago

There is no magic solution to the "problem" of "how to dictate rules to a large society that will keep things smooth and productive". The problem is fundamentally intractable if you insist on looking at it that way. There is another option, which is to not dictate rules at all, unless you absolutely have to in order to have a civil society in the first place. For example, we have laws against things like murder and theft and fraud, because you can't have a civil society if those things aren't deterred and punished. But the vast majority of the laws and regulations we have in place now are not doing that. They're attempts to micromanage from the top something that fundamentally cannot be micromanaged from the top. Nobody has enough knowledge to do that. So we should stop doing it.

MattPalmer1086 5mo ago
Giving up is not a strategy. Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity, but not having any at all is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster. For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
- pdonis 5mo ago
  > Giving up is not a strategy. Nor is it what I advocated. > Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their markets. > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened? > Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly). You're assuming that food and water providers would be able to do such things in a "free market". But doing such things is obviously bad for business, so providers would have a strong incentive not to do it in a free market, since in a free market, doing things that are bad for business makes you go out of business. In our current regulatory environment, however, large corporations can do many things that are bad for business, as long as they can get government regulators to agree to let them. For an example from a few years ago, a major aicraft manufacturer got the FAA to approve a change to one of its oldest aircraft types that ended up killing two airplanes full of people. How? Because the FAA didn't even look at the change: the "regulation" had evolved to the point where the FAA just took the manufacturer's word for it that everything was OK. In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business. But of course in our current regulatory environment that can't happen, because regulation has forced aircraft manufacturers to amalgamate to the point that neither of the two biggest ones can ever be allowed to go out of business--too many long chains of dominoes, including much of the US's military capability (and not just in airplanes), depend on them. Tell me again how regulations make things better?
  - lovich 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - foltik 5mo ago
      Indeed, I’m not sure what compels people to compare real regulatory systems from now or history to some imaginary free market where producers always act in their long-term interest and consumers always have perfect information. Every functioning society on earth regulates food drugs and infrastructure. We lived through the unregulated version for centuries, and it took mountains of dead children and poisoned workers to win the rules we have now; tearing them down just means ordinary people will pay the price all over again. Capture is a failure mode of every institution humans have ever built, including the courts we presumably still want. The answer is to design better institutions, not to get rid of them and hope things work out.
      - pdonis 5mo ago
        > We lived through the unregulated version for centuries In the sense that we didn't have, say, the FDA, yes, that's true. But that doesn't mean food production, for example, was unregulated. It means it was regulated by the voluntary choices of people producing and consuming food. That system did not produce "mountains of dead children and poisoned workers". Those things happened after food production became a mass industry, not before. There was a difference, before food production became a mass industry: most people knew the people who were producing their food, personally. That does change the incentives involved. One could make a case that, now that food production is a mass industry, and people don't for the most part know personally anyone who is involved with producing their food, we need regulations that we didn't need before. But that's a different argument than the one you're making. One could also make a case the opposite way, that governments already had the tools in place to regulate food production as a mass industry--for example, by stopping large food corporations from using mafia-like methods to bully their supply chains--and failed to use them, which resulted in a bigger government--the Federal government--stepping in and stomping on them. And that the result of that, now, as I pointed out in another post elsewhere in this thread, has not been "safe food" that we didn't have before: we have meat full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops are crowded out, etc. > The answer is to design better institutions That effort has been going on for millennia. As Dr. Phil likes to say, how's that workin' out for ya? Or, if you want another common saying, isn't the standard definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results this time?
- cucumber3732842 5mo ago
  The federal bureaucracy is dictating[1] a lot of minutia on the square centimeter level that should be getting done at the square kilometer level. We could probably give up on a lot of detailed stuff without any negative effect. Like for example the amount of water a toilet flush can has been federally regulated since the 90s. Sure, that might be important if you need to keep some schmucks in the desert from bickering over aquifer depletion and whatnot. But the majority of jurisdictions in the east "we take surface water and give it back to the same watershed" jurisdictions who can use all the water they want and only impact the required size of the hardware at the treatment plant. So why are we even regulating this? And any issue you look into there's a plethora of stuff like that. Theoretically it's all justifiable in abstract but that's like littering, it doesn't scale. [1] via "states shall adopt in order to qualify for this grant" type rules which the states then roll downhill
- robocat 5mo ago
  FYI, poisonous chemicals are allowed in your drinking water. The current federal limits include: Cyanide: 0.2 mg/L Uranium: 30 µg/L Gross alpha particles: 15 picocuries per liter (pCi/L). Beta particles and photon emitters: 4 millirem/year dose equivalent Dosis sola facit venenum https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

by pdonis 5mo ago

MattPalmer1086 5mo ago

Giving up is not a strategy. Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity, but not having any at all is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster. For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).

pdonis 5mo ago
> Giving up is not a strategy. Nor is it what I advocated. > Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their markets. > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened? > Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly). You're assuming that food and water providers would be able to do such things in a "free market". But doing such things is obviously bad for business, so providers would have a strong incentive not to do it in a free market, since in a free market, doing things that are bad for business makes you go out of business. In our current regulatory environment, however, large corporations can do many things that are bad for business, as long as they can get government regulators to agree to let them. For an example from a few years ago, a major aicraft manufacturer got the FAA to approve a change to one of its oldest aircraft types that ended up killing two airplanes full of people. How? Because the FAA didn't even look at the change: the "regulation" had evolved to the point where the FAA just took the manufacturer's word for it that everything was OK. In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business. But of course in our current regulatory environment that can't happen, because regulation has forced aircraft manufacturers to amalgamate to the point that neither of the two biggest ones can ever be allowed to go out of business--too many long chains of dominoes, including much of the US's military capability (and not just in airplanes), depend on them. Tell me again how regulations make things better?
- lovich 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - foltik 5mo ago
    Indeed, I’m not sure what compels people to compare real regulatory systems from now or history to some imaginary free market where producers always act in their long-term interest and consumers always have perfect information. Every functioning society on earth regulates food drugs and infrastructure. We lived through the unregulated version for centuries, and it took mountains of dead children and poisoned workers to win the rules we have now; tearing them down just means ordinary people will pay the price all over again. Capture is a failure mode of every institution humans have ever built, including the courts we presumably still want. The answer is to design better institutions, not to get rid of them and hope things work out.
    - pdonis 5mo ago
      > We lived through the unregulated version for centuries In the sense that we didn't have, say, the FDA, yes, that's true. But that doesn't mean food production, for example, was unregulated. It means it was regulated by the voluntary choices of people producing and consuming food. That system did not produce "mountains of dead children and poisoned workers". Those things happened after food production became a mass industry, not before. There was a difference, before food production became a mass industry: most people knew the people who were producing their food, personally. That does change the incentives involved. One could make a case that, now that food production is a mass industry, and people don't for the most part know personally anyone who is involved with producing their food, we need regulations that we didn't need before. But that's a different argument than the one you're making. One could also make a case the opposite way, that governments already had the tools in place to regulate food production as a mass industry--for example, by stopping large food corporations from using mafia-like methods to bully their supply chains--and failed to use them, which resulted in a bigger government--the Federal government--stepping in and stomping on them. And that the result of that, now, as I pointed out in another post elsewhere in this thread, has not been "safe food" that we didn't have before: we have meat full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops are crowded out, etc. > The answer is to design better institutions That effort has been going on for millennia. As Dr. Phil likes to say, how's that workin' out for ya? Or, if you want another common saying, isn't the standard definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results this time?
cucumber3732842 5mo ago
The federal bureaucracy is dictating[1] a lot of minutia on the square centimeter level that should be getting done at the square kilometer level. We could probably give up on a lot of detailed stuff without any negative effect. Like for example the amount of water a toilet flush can has been federally regulated since the 90s. Sure, that might be important if you need to keep some schmucks in the desert from bickering over aquifer depletion and whatnot. But the majority of jurisdictions in the east "we take surface water and give it back to the same watershed" jurisdictions who can use all the water they want and only impact the required size of the hardware at the treatment plant. So why are we even regulating this? And any issue you look into there's a plethora of stuff like that. Theoretically it's all justifiable in abstract but that's like littering, it doesn't scale. [1] via "states shall adopt in order to qualify for this grant" type rules which the states then roll downhill
robocat 5mo ago
FYI, poisonous chemicals are allowed in your drinking water. The current federal limits include: Cyanide: 0.2 mg/L Uranium: 30 µg/L Gross alpha particles: 15 picocuries per liter (pCi/L). Beta particles and photon emitters: 4 millirem/year dose equivalent Dosis sola facit venenum https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison