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0 pointschiaro11y ago0 comments

That's kind of the catch, isn't it? All the government agencies that do their job with efficacy wouldn't be the ones you'd be made aware of. Only when something goes wrong do you become aware that your local water board performs useful work.

To the point though, regulation ensures our planes crash at a rate of less than one per 21,000 years of flight time. Food safety regulations have dropped e.coli poisoning by half in 15 years. I believe there's a state by state comparison on road deaths following seatbelt regulations, showing a clear causative effect.

Maybe we'd be a bit more aware of the fact that the government actually works pretty well most of the time if we sent our little prayers of gratitude to the Federal Aviation Administration on touch down instead.

Despite this, my larger point is that it works even better in most other Western countries. You can see this quite clearly in at least one case by comparing public expenditures on healthcare per person. Single payer health insurance is more effective per dollar, regardless of possible criticism on other grounds.

Largely, because the free market is a poor regulator, and the government does it pretty well most of the time. To break it down:

a) there are things we'd rather corporations didn't do, for the good of society as a whole - such as misleading consumers about ingredients, or hey, hiring local cartels to break down some unions in Columbia.

b) consumer action by itself is ineffective. Boycotts, in the vast majority of cases, are too transient to be effective. This is compounded by the sheer number of companies one must try to keep track of to be an ethical consumer, the cartel example above is Coca-Cola, for example. Furthermore, say a mining or oil company is doing massive ecological damage. It's just too difficult to be able to track the produce of that mine to any decisions you make personally to effect what minute sway that decision would have.

c) the solution is to codify our standards for this behavior by social agreement, and penalize corporations that are found wanting. This is a regulatory body that provides a net benefit to society.

I do agree that the government has protectionist and overreaching regulations in certain areas, but I believe it's remiss to label the entire government as such. "Big" and "small" government are rhetorical buzzwords that prevent people from evaluating regulations and regulatory bodies on the case by case basis they require.

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nickff11y ago

1. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actually used on Wikipedia as an example on the regulatory capture page; saying that "[i]n a June 2010 article on regulatory capture, the FAA was cited as an example of "old-style" regulatory capture, "in which the airline industry openly dictates to its regulators its governing rules, arranging for not only beneficial regulation but placing key people to head these regulators".[1] If you believe that regulations have improved food safety, I suppose that would be attributable to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where there is substantial evidence that it has caused more deaths than it has prevented, as well as evidence that it has gone out of its way for the benefit of some corporations; I have too many citations to provide for easy reading here, but the Wikipedia page is a good start.[2] It is possible that seatbelt laws sped up adoption, but the government has continued to ratchet up safety requirements without regard to the cost/benefit ratio to consumers, and the regulations have prevented further innovation in many area of automotive design and construction.[3][4]

2. a) Although the 'ingredients list' is a frequently cited example, the court system is sufficient to police this, as product descriptions are legally binding; the judicial system serves well in areas without 'consumer protection' agencies, such as electronic component performance specifications.

b) Is the problem that consumer action is ineffective, or that the majority of consumers don't agree with you, and engage in the same boycotts you do? Boycotts by individuals and corporations were effective in pressuring South Africa to stop apartheid, and have worked against many companies including Nike. I for one cannot manage to persuade my fellow citizens to boycott "The Simpsons" (which I don't find funny), or "Lululemon" (which far too many people wear outside of yoga classes), but that does not mean that I should be given the coercive power of the state. Perhaps the onus is on you to be more persuasive, and regulators are unnecessary here as well.

c) Maybe codifying standards into law is a possible solution, but the real problem is that there is no way to prevent the standards which are codified from being crafted in such a manner as to benefit special interests more than the general public (for public choice, and political ignorance reasons).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_...

[3] http://econlog.econlib.org/2014/10/09/mueller2.jpg

[4] http://www.autonews.com/article/20140331/OEM11/140339975/tes...

wutbrodo11y ago

> the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where there is substantial evidence that it has caused more deaths than it has prevented,

This claim establishes you either as having horribly terrible reading comprehension, being a liar, or being a lunatic. The idea that the FDA has _cost more lives than it saves_ is so laughably insane that I don't even know where to begin. I guess the easiest place to start is the fact that your "sources" say nothing of the sort: the closest they come to you claim is the the a _specific_ amendment that the FDA made 50 years ago "may have cost more lives than it saved". To somehow conclude that applies to the FDA at large seems impossible for anyone with a reading comprehension level higher than the second grade.

chiaroOP11y ago

Reading through the specifics, you are right, it seems that the FAA is not doing as good a job as it should be, with episodic laxness in safety checks. It's a leap to say that the industry would be safer or otherwise better off without it though.

Claiming that the FDA has caused more deaths than prevented is, I'm afraid, utterly mindboggling. I can't really entertain the notion seriously, and can only think that this is more selection bias. Do share the evidence, though I feel it'd be a difficult thing to quantify concretely.

Ingredients lists is a throwaway example. More difficult elements to police are things like pesticide usage, hormone usage, presence of disease causing bacteria or molds. The reason Mad Cow Disease is no longer relevant is due to quick identification of the problem and suitable regulation to rectify it. 4.4 million cattle were killed to eradicate the disease, which is difficult to imagine happening quite so thoroughly by the individual volition of the farmers involved.

As for boycotts, it comes down to a separation of belief and behavior. Say a company with production in the third world sometimes uses slave labor. I'm confident that the majority of consumers would agree that this is not a morally acceptable thing for the company to be doing. However, this doesn't necessarily translate into changes in purchase decisions, if the consumer even finds out about this fact in the first place. Immoral corporate action is only rarely confronted by boycott, and only rarely does that boycott then work. Personal preferences are beside the point, and it's disingenuous to compare cartoons to human rights abuses.

Codification of standards can and is done without privileging special interests over the commons. In most other Western countries, this is pretty well understood. The political structure in the US (low voter turnouts require excessive campaign funds which require pandering, for one) means that regulatory bodies may be more susceptible to capture than most, but the fault does not lie with the existence of the body in the first place, nor in most places, does it wholly negate what good the regulator does do.

It does look that way, of course. "Fluoridation of Water Saves Another Ten Million Cavities" is unfortunately a headline I've yet to see.

PeterisP11y ago

I don't know what exactly the parent poster had in mind about FDA, but a commonly seen argument is that delaying a drug for a year by requiring more tests saves X expected lives (more chance to discover adverse effects), but also costs Y lives (those who would've been saved during that year), and that FDA are motivated by political reasons to act to ensure safety even in cases when X is significantly less than Y - thus, in effect, killing many people.

But that's not my point to make, so I can't give specific examples.

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