Comment by miki123211
8 hours ago
Don't forget vetocracy.
Every regulation, whether it's environmental, DEIA or anti-fraud, adds a few steps to each project. With enough regulations and enough steps, things just slow down to a crawl.
As governments and legal systems get older, they get into more and more situations where a bad thing happens, and the politicians must show that they've done something to stop a similar thing from happening again. Nobody can publicly admit that it's fine to letting a 5-year-old kid die once in a while, even if that would be the right call. This results in more and more layers of regulation being added, which nobody has an incentive to remove.
> Nobody can publicly admit that it's fine to letting a 5-year-old kid die once in a while, even if that would be the right call.
Sure, there are such cases, but a lot of regulation was written in blood, and the price that affected individuals or even our whole species paid was often monumental:
Having cancer literally eat the workers faces is not acceptable (=> radium girls), nor are mistakes like leaded gas or CFCs.
Everytime people advocate for big immediate gains from abolishing regulations, you can be almost certain that they are selling toxic snake oil.
Current US admin seems no exception, especially when comparing related promises with actual results (e.g. Doge).
edit: I'm not saying that pruning back regulations is bad, but it needs to be a careful, deliberate effort and big immediate payoffs are often unrealistic.