Comment by AnthonyMouse
11 hours ago
Almost but not quite.
For most people, they never directly interact with government regulations because somebody else does it. They work for a large corporation and then the corporation requires them to do wasteful or nonsensical things which they ascribe to management incompetence, but it's really because the corporation's lawyers made it a requirement.
Then there are the people who are actually doing the compliance paperwork, but they don't object because it's the thing that pays their salary. Moreover, it's their occupation so all the time required to figure out how to do it is now a sunk cost for them and the last thing they want is to get rid of it and make all that time they invested worthless.
The people who object are the people trying to start a new business, because nobody is paying them to do things that don't make sense and all they want is to get on with what they're actually trying to accomplish instead of paying one fee after another or waiting on unaccountable regulators who have no reason to say no to something but still take excruciatingly long to say yes.
> The people who object are the people trying to start a new business, because nobody is paying them to do things that don't make sense and all they want is to get on with what they're actually trying to accomplish instead of paying one fee after another or waiting on unaccountable regulators who have no reason to say no to something but still take excruciatingly long to say yes.
This is an extremely disingenuous opinion, which causally omits the whole reason regulations are necessary and exist to start with.
The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.
Regulation is absolutely necessary because these orgs either don't care or are oblivious to the harm they are causing, and either way have absolutely no motivation to right their wrongs.
Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too much of an inconvenience?
It's perfectly fine to expect regulators to streamline their processes. What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical rentism from bureaucrats. They are accountability mechanisms designed to proactively prevent bad actors from causing harm to society as a whole, and they work by requiring that organizations proactively demonstrate they aren't causing said harm.
Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations already have a long track record of causing that very harm to society. Why is this fact ignored?
>The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.
The problem with blind government maximalism is that it ignores the fact that what these governments claim to actually be trying to accomplish can actually be harmful and have considerable negative impact on society in general.
Sure, but the fundamental premise is that good corporations are seeking to generate profits, and good governments are seeking to provide for their constituents.
A corporation that doesn't prioritize profits isn't a good corporation. You wouldn't buy stock in it. A government that isn't prioritizing its constituents is a bad one, you wouldn't vote for it.
Everything else is implementation detail but it's obvious that governments need to check corporate power because otherwise the inevitable end game is a corpotocracy ruling over factory towns of debt slaves.
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> The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.
The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids. What actual harm and considerable negative impact on society in general are you referring to in this context?
> Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too much of an inconvenience?
Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill considered or poorly drafted and require things that are not aligned with their ostensible purpose.
> What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical rentism from bureaucrats.
How about whimsical rentism from incumbents who want to exclude competitors or avaricious middlemen who want their services to be expensive and mandatory, and capture the regulators to make that happen?
> Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations already have a long track record of causing that very harm to society. Why is this fact ignored?
The subset of the rules that aren't actually necessary aren't actually necessary. Why is this fact ignored?
> The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids. What actual harm and considerable negative impact on society in general are you referring to in this context?
For almost any regulation, no matter how important it is and how much good it does, there will be some things it does not allow that it should. A regulation will either need to let the bad stuff through, not let the good stuff through, or some mixture of the two.
Now consider that many individual regulations get added; the vast majority of them for good reasons. But since each one has some cases it fails for, the combination of them has a combination (generally larger than the sum of it's parts) that it fails for.
But that mean that regulations are bad in general. It means that making rules to protect society is HARD. Like REALLY hard, staggeringly so. And even doing the best you possibly can (which is a stretch for most government), you're still going to wind up with things that can't be done... but should be able to.
The solution isn't to get rid of (all) regulations... it's to try to figure out how to make them better.
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What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion. Just as you can come up with a few examples of things you think should be less regulated (and many people may agree), others can come up with a few examples of things they think should be more regulated (and many people may also agree).
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> The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids.
No. The article is about someone who is whining about having to comply with regulation. But not all regulation, only the one they feel they are having trouble complying with.
There is a difference. And a nuance.
You'd be naive if you were hoping to get objective statements from what reads clearly as a promotion piece.
> Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill considered or poorly drafted and require things that are not aligned with their ostensible purpose.
You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish. We need to discuss objectively verifiable facts if you want to attack specific regulations, though. I don't see fact-based arguments being made, and that reads like a desperate straw man.
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