Hacker News Reader

Comment by tankenmate | Hacker News Reader

If this view is correct then you need regulation as some areas of the market are zero sum (or worse negative sum) and self-interested gain in these areas necessarily means losses to others; and for unmeasured externalities this can lead to very very large public losses, pollution is one such example.

In my opinion the vast majority of people prefer to "grow the pie" and win-win situations; but again equality of outcomes also figures in individual / social perception.

View on HN

A good question here is "What is the best form of regulation?" In some cases, media focused on business activity or industry groups perform better at regulating the market than government. One example is the food industry. An outbreak of salmonella or other food borne illness that is heavily reported by the press is far more damaging and a much stronger inventivizer for food manufacturing facilities to maintain safe production standards than the FDA or USDA.

Media is in reaction to multiple people catching deadly illnesses. Media can also be silenced. Worse, it's not even guaranteed the media catches on that. And it'll be extremely localised.

FDA rules prevent those events from happening, as well as guaranteeing a baseline for food quality.

I'm going to stay with the FDA.

> FDA rules prevent those events from happening

If that was true then we wouldn't hear about it in the media. We do hear about it, which means that it does still happen, which means that the FDA rules do not prevent those events from happening.

Murder is illegal as well, yet you still hear about murders. That doesn't mean that the police aren't effective. Public health laws prohibit restaurants from storing raw meat at room temperature in the kitchen. Inspectors routinely find violations, and remediate by fining or even shutting down the restaurant.

Likewise, the FDA and USDA regulations are both largely effective and provide a common compliance target for producers and manufacturers to achieve. Sometimes there are issues, and the government has the ability to fine or demand recalls to protect public safety.

Many of the systemic gaps, especially in meat production, are a result of de-regulation where the USDA/FDA lost the ability to recall tainted meats and can only request voluntary compliance.

You're right; we do still hear about murders. We hear about them because the law does not prevent them from happening.

I was not trying to claim that the FDA never does any good. I was directly countering a false claim presented by the person to whom I was replying.

Since you want to be pedantic, yes, it does not _prevent_.

It helps with it not being a daily occurence. Which it would be, were the FDA not there, or had there been no regulations.

You don't hear about all the times that the FDA actually stopped tainted food products from reaching the market.

The media get the official notification from the FDA or USDA. There is a scientific process being followed from an authority that's accountable to the public regardless of profit motive.

There are such things as market failures, and at least in a democracy, it's a fairly quick event that market failures lead the public to petitioning the government to legislate alternative outcomes to the market.

And yet good food regulations have saved many more lives from outbreaks than all the negative media combined. The media is good but it works best on saliency, the unusual. People, a very very large number, die every day in car accidents, but it rarely hits the headlines unless it is an unusual case.

I'd like to see some statistics to back up this assertion.

I must admit I don't have any comprehensive stats to hand, even the WHO have only recently compiled worldwide occurrence stats but not correlation / causation stats.

However from a programming paradigm, which would you prefer? Bugs cleaned up only because "someone" reported them, or because you use CI and can fix the problem at source, can measure testing coverage, etc, etc. I think most programmers agree that the proactive systemic testing system is better than ad hoc.

So is that proactive systemic testing put in place because the FDA requires it, or because the food processing facility fears an outbreak that would bankrupt the company?

There is no FDA for bugs in software companies, which is far less consequential, yet most software companies invest a fairly reasonable amount of engineering time into quality control. So this begs the questions, how much good does the FDA really do?

A free market is not a market without regulations, in the same way as a free society is not a society without laws.

This is a specious analogy. A free society is free because it can decide its own laws. The equivalent would be self-regulation by market participants.

Considering that the whole country are market participants and not just the capitalists they can create market rules the same way they can create laws and still be free. The whole belief that the "markets" are apart from society makes no sense.

Just like a fox is self-regulating at the hen house?

And this happens because there is a dichotomy; a free society with only one class of participant vs a society with free people and slaves. The marketplace always has at least two classes, buyers and sellers. Buyers are typically those with liquid negotiable assets and sellers those with less liquid / negotiable assets; the most common liquid negotiable asset being cash. So when there is more than one class then there is a much higher probability that one party will have more "power" than the other, cf voters vs representatives in representative democracies, multi-national companies vs individual consumers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com