Comment by seibelj
3 years ago
And yet highly logical people on HN will simultaneously argue that the government and its bureaucracy is a great thing and we should increase regulation and rules in all facets of the tech industry.
The security side is literally the only part of tech that is remotely “regulated”. Self-policing organizations created their own standards and private firms conduct the audits. Yet it’s obviously bullshit and box ticking.
Do you not realize this is how everything in society works? It’s endless make-work where highly credentialed know-nothings check boxes in order to fulfill some bureaucratic process they didn’t invent and don’t care / aren’t capable of improving.
This is the end result of bureaucracy.
Some regulations are good, some are bad. Some just have purposes different from what people assume. Saying its impossible to regulate anything is just as stupid as saying its possible to regulate everything.
Yet there is an extreme aversion to “de-regulation” as if all regulation is good and any attempt at reforming bad regulation is reactionary and evil. The regulatory state is ever-expanding and contracts only rarely in very isolated instances.
Isn't an expanding regulatory state an inevitability as population growth explodes and companies gain ever-greater power?
More people and more powerful companies means more abuses of power, which we solve (or try to solve) with regulations. And deregulation is often a simple power grab by unscrupulous companies with the help of crony politicians.
These aren't universal truths, but I think it does start to explain why regulations expand more than they contract.
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