Because I’m Tired of the Child Accusation

Humans began to make serious advances once they learned to work together. Along with the opposible thumb, the ability to work together for a common goal is what sets humans apart from the "lower" animals. Randites and Libertarians conveniently overlook this in their screeds against "coercive" authorities, then when called on it fall back on the assertion that they really aren't anarchists. Considering that far right groups are leading the charge agains the simplest and most effective means we have of fighting Covid19, i.e. the mask, I take such assertions with a grain of salt.

I'm not particularly trusting of government myself, I think the primary difference is that I'm even less trusting of private enterprise. In my time working in the banking sector I've come to learn that the only thing banks fear is government audits and regulations.

The biggest difference between liberals and libertarians is their approach to private enterprise vs. government. For me, government is the mechanism by which capitalism's darker impulses are held in check, maybe I'm just not creative enough, but there are some things that I struggle with figuring out how to vote with my dollar, especially when it comes to companies that collect information on us and we have no direct commercial relationship with.

I'd say unbridled capitalism and Marxism are both equally laughably, disastrously wrong. They both fail because they don't take human nature into account. Marxism ignores human selfishness and the human desire to be compensated in proportion to their effort. Unbridled capitalism ignores human greed and the human propensity to take advantage of others if it means they can get ahead.

On the contrary, capitalism takes full advantage of those qualities, which is why it requires independent oversight.

What she's basically saying is there is a very minimal statistical correlation between public support for a bill and its likelihood of passage. On the other hand, there is a very strong statistical correlation between support for a bill from the rich or special interest groups and its likelihood of passage.

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites...testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

What use is independent oversight without an enforcement mechanism?

From whence does an enforcement mechanism come outside of government?

That assumes consumers have no power at all. That’s simply not true. Do you think that all the pro-BLM messaging lately has been done because of a shareholder revolt? Or even more laughably, due to government pressure? No, it’s customer backlash they fear.

This is certainly not true in the general case. It takes millions of people marching in the street to get a handful of the most abusive, murderous cops fired, let alone charged. And as far as lawsuits go? Forget about it.

A government intervention in the market to keep creditors from going after managers and shareholders as much as they otherwise could, and one in which shareholders are still wiped out. Even by your own standards, corporations would avoid that if at all possible.

How is that not the goal? If the business form changes, it’s not doing the same harmful thing, right?

Restitution is a good thing, and governments can and do make rules to throw out suits against them in the first place.

No government legislator or officer has to worry about anything except civil unrest on less than a two year schedule. Then they trot out the negative ads, convince you that as bad as they are the other guy is worse, and nothing changes. How is it that a few bad apples can spoil the barrel of policing for you, but not the structure that employs the police to begin with? 7(?) weeks of continuous protests, and what’s changed? A handful of officers fired. 3 charged with murder. 1 police department disbanded (it’ll be back... you were saying about changing forms?) and 1 state has changed its qualified immunity laws (and there’s a good chance that’ll be struck down).

Even Apple and Amazon don’t carry guns and shoot black people for sport and get away with it for 150 years. That takes government.

It sounds like you're blaming government for not being superior to the beings that created it.

Unregulated businesses don't shoot people?

Tell that to those living in fear of Mexican drug cartels.

Organised crime frequently represents what capitalism can look like outside of the control of external regulatory bodies.

Not in a free market. You can slow down the process a tiny bit, but you will always end up with capital concentrated in a few key players, and you will always end up with a maximum of rationalized procedures of production and distribution, because both of those things is what market forces automatically push for. If you don't want that, you don't want the free market.

Drug cartels are unregulated? News to me. But you make a good point. Prohibition did create a ton of organized crime... the vast bulk of which disappeared when prohibition ended. I wonder what might happen if drug prohibition were similarly ended.

I'm hoping this wasn't a deliberate bait and switch because drugs were and are only an example of the means by which organised crime can operate and profit. The point is such organisations are exactly what unregulated capitalism looks like and they do indeed kill people to further their own ends.

In fact prohibition (for alcohol or drugs) is a perfect example of that because prohibition=/=regulation. Prohibition is absolute, "you may not do this", meaning anyone who then does so anyway is operating outside of any regulatory system. Regulation is a set of safeguards to allow an activity to proceed without damaging society.

Cartels are unregulated capitalists.

Capone was an unregulated capitalist.

Replacing prohibition with a system via which someone can legally profit from a venture is what tamed the beast and I suspect you realise that distinction and went ahead with your post anyway, which is disappointing.

I'd really like to know what your presumption of "human nature" is?

I suspect I'd find it laughably, disastrously, wrong.

Yes, thank you.
it’s also spelled out implicitly in this video.

No idea, but I’m really curious to see who the Anheuser Busch of LSD is going to be.

I’m trying to figure out why the default conservative response to regulatory capture is to just go, “hmm, there doesn’t appear to be the right type of oversight here, best just get rid of all of it.”
I do agree that regulations can act as a barrier to entry to small businesses, but there are other answers besides getting rid of regulations. One would be to create government organizations that assist small businesses in navigating regulations. The other is to modify the regulations for new entrants.

Indeed.

Regulations do not, contrary to popular belief, exist in order to make tings difficult.

They exist to make things safe.

This is the theory, and I agree with that theory.

Nevertheless, due to regulations having to be adapted to a large variety of situations, they are never perfectly adapted to any situation. Thus, some of them inevitably make things difficult.

I am not calling for the elimination of regulations, by any means. But not all regulations are created equal. There are some that are very good, some that are very good in some situations and counter-productive in others, and some that just weren't well thought through by those who put them in place.

Like the regulations that allow police departments in the US to have military equipment...

Both solutions involve more government. The whole point is to take the government out of the equation.

I think, but can't swear to it, that everything was lost in March of '04 and we started over from scratch.

That sounds like a conclusion, what data helped you decide that monopoly power was an acceptable reason for the government to interfere, but not zoning regulations, pollution regulations, or any other policy? Or was your decision not data driven at all?

Probably a Joe Rogan Youtube video.

I didn’t know opinions had to be data driven. Also, I never said that we should have zero regulations. What I did say was often times it is the government that does more harm than good and hinders small businesses.

Ridiculous. Assault and murder don't stop being illegal once you enter the business realm, nor does murder and assault necessarily stop when you regulate instead of prohibit. Rather, the lawful competitors outcompete the unlawful ones, because there's no risk premium they have to make up, so their prices can be lower.

But back to murder continuing: Eric Garner was selling cigarettes when the police murdered him, a regulated activity that he was in violation of. Organized crime regularly extort and make examples of otherwise legitimate businesses, and traffic in regulated goods all the time, not just prohibited ones. But they can't compete on the least-regulated ones.

All regulation is is the prohibition of a particular business practice, prohibition of a set of them (when one is made mandatory), or a tax. Some are good - anything outlawing fraud or aggressive force, and maaaaybe negligence (I'm not an anarchist, remember). And for the sake of argument, preventing tragedies of the commons when there's no better method available (which I dispute is the case in most scenarios). Some (probably most) are bad. Every one should be something worth arresting someone over to prevent a bad outcome, otherwise it's just an expansion of the police state and an opportunity for less scrupulous actors to go into business.

Hardly, on either count. Accountability doesn't have to come from government. A slate of bad reviews will shut down a restaurant far faster than the health department. A nastygram or lawsuit gets a broken elevator fixed faster than an inspector.

Opinions don't have to be data driven, but when comparing two opinions, one in which there is data to back it up, and one in which there is not, the answer must be to either get data on the opinion for which no data is available, ignore it, or provide a valid justification for why data isn't necessary (pretty rare).

The "red tape" you speak of often has measurable implications, for example, pollution regulations has resulted in increased health, quality of life, and property values. Zoning regulations prevent residential or commercial real estate owners from having their property values decreased by noise from industry. To give an example, in a Netherlands study of property values adjacent to industrial sites, the authors found that there was a correlation between the distance from a residential home to an industrial site and the sale price of the property.

Not a big believer in regulatory capture, are you? While I don't have hard data (and even compiling it would be a Herculean task - probably a lot like the Aegean Stables), I'd be shocked if half of it in the US wasn't specifically to erect barriers to market entry, written at the behest of the major players in the industries the regulators oversee. It's definitely the case locally, in San Francisco. Basically everything that isn't fire code is designed to benefit, and often written by, incumbent players in any given space.

I don't disagree with the premise, but that shows that the issue with government oversight may be that the fine is worth less than the cost of doing business, but the lawsuit isn't.

Nastygrams don't get anything done unless you're sending it to the right person, and usually that's the news, government official, or concerned citizens group.

It's the timing, not the size of the fine. Any government that you'd find remotely acceptable isn't going to inspect every elevator regularly enough to catch problems (presumably you wouldn't tolerate an elevator inspection Stasi). But they can break in dangerous ways any time.

Opinions are like assholes....data is what helps distinguish the two.

That's what the regulators in red states keep saying when they regulate abortion clinics into oblivion because they can't outlaw them.