Comment by locknitpicker
11 hours ago
> 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.
I would challenge both of those.
Corporations exist to do whatever their directors or shareholders want them to do. For publicly-traded corporations that's typically to generate profits, but not all corporations are listed on a stock exchange and even the public ones could in principle have their shareholders vote to do something else. If a corporation wants to build electric cars to fight climate change or build housing to reduce housing scarcity, that doesn't make it "bad" -- it's good, and you don't want the government impeding that when somebody wants to do it. Or even when they want to do the same thing to make money, because it can be both things at once.
And just because a government that doesn't prioritize its constituents is bad doesn't mean that the government we have is good, or that every existing regulation is benefiting constituents rather than harming them.
> Everything else is implementation detail
Which is kind of the part that matters.
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In the situation that the personnel and legal code of the government depend very little on the outcome of elections in practice, would you say that the incentives for a government would be rather different?
> 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.
The claim that something is hard to do properly is an argument for doing it less often, i.e. limiting it to the cases when the benefit is unambiguously large and staying away from borderline cases where overhead and collateral damage will leave you underwater.
It's also an argument for requiring the government to internalize the costs it imposes, e.g. if it wants testing done then it should pay for it from general revenue so that the cost of it is accounted for in the government budget instead of imposing an unfunded mandate. Then if the cost is reasonable this isn't a problem and if the cost is unreasonable the government is causing a problem for itself instead of innocent third parties, which puts the incentive to fix it in the right place.
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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).
> What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion.
The blog post clearly tries to frame their problems complying with existing regulation as stumbling upon road blocks which just so happen to comprise only of unnecessary rules.
It's quite the coincidence how each and every single restriction that isn't met ends up being unnecessary.
> What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion.
To begin with, no it isn't. There are a lot of existing regulations that serve no legitimate purpose. Some exist solely at the behest of incumbents and are enacted under a false pretext by corrupt government officials; no one supports them who isn't being disingenuous. Others aren't even wanted by anyone and are simply regulatory errors that failed to account for something that actually happens, but the people impacted don't have the political influence to correct it.
Moreover, what if there are some regulations that people differ on? Should we keep the ones only a minority of people think are a good idea, just because they already exist?
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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.
> 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.
Which brings us to the question of whether the regulation they're complaining about is actually objectionable. And it appears that they rather have a point. Why should they have to spend millions of dollars testing for something that makes no sense in this context? Why is the government even testing for this at all, when fuel is a semi truck's primary operating cost and buyers are going to be highly sensitive to fuel efficiency independent of any government regulations?
> You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish.
This is not a hypothetical unless your contention is that all existing regulations are entirely without flaws or inefficiencies.
> We need to discuss objectively verifiable facts if you want to attack specific regulations, though.
Do you want to try to defend the rule requiring them to spend millions of dollars on certifications for no apparent benefit to anyone?
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