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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

This is a misunderstanding how how government works. You need to have some kind of institution in order to get anything enforced. Building up institutions full of competent people with a mandate to craft and enforce carefully designed regulations and respond to changing circumstances is the way to attack these kinds of big problems.

(Of course, institutions can only be so effective when their leadership is unlawfully replaced with incompetent industry hacks by the next administration; the only way to tackle that is with higher-level political action: court fights, impeachment, and ultimately elections.)

Just laws on the books doesn’t accomplish anything. There are already plenty of laws against ripping off consumers, but corporatist ideologues in control of the US Supreme Court have spent the last several decades watering down the potential liability via increasingly tendentious reinterpretations.

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you misunderstand how enforcement works. It's done via law enforcement agencies that exist already. It doesn't need a special new "bureau" for each type of rule. If you don't believe me that there are law enforcement agencies, I can show you how to summon them very easily.

Now, the question is, why don't these agencies enforce the same laws against corporations? That's the premise of my initial comment, which you also misunderstood.

There are many different organizations within the US federal government (not to mention state governments) which deal in one way or another with regulation and enforcement.

Many of the ones commonly considered to be “law enforcement agencies” per se are listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_law_enforcement_in_the... but there are many other federal agencies which might also be considered “law enforcement” under a broader interpretation of that term.

Different agencies have different focus, different mandate, different institutional powers, etc.

Arguably the functions established for the CFPB to perform could be undertaken by some other institution. But the point of the legislation and its implementation (which Warren and others worked very carefully on) was creating a semi-autonomous institution solely focused on consumer financial protection.

During the Obama years the CFPB was pretty effective, despite unified and extreme opposition from GOP politicians. (Its effectiveness explains why some folks were eager to see it defanged.)

Even with cigarettes, a product that kills its consumer even when used exactly as designed, congress wont' ban them because that would negatively impact a corporation. But you seem to think that corporations don't need to abide by clear-cut rules. they need some kind of "bureau" so that there can be a constant back-and-forth, give-and-take, so that we don't impact that poor, tender corporation. Why is that required, but we don't need a "domestic violence bureau" ? Clear-cut laws seem to work fine for poor people. Why won't they work for corporations?

> corporations don't need to abide by clear-cut rules

This is a straw man. Nobody thinks this.

> but we don't need a "domestic violence bureau"

There are several federal institutions which deal with domestic violence (alongside additional state and local ones). For example the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, and has the mandate to “understand, respond to, and prevent” domestic violence.

The FBI can also investigate specific domestic violence crimes, but my impression is that it is not their highest priority.

Domestic violence is a huge problem and is famously underreported, underinvestigated, and underprosecuted. Probably not the best example you might pick; arguably having additional government agencies with the power to do something about domestic violence might make a positive difference. (Disclaimer: I know very little about this subject.)

you keep backpedaling about bureaus, ignoring how 99% of the law in this nation is enforced. we can't have a conversation if you do contortions by reading the most implausible interpretation of everything I say.

Federal agencies enforce crimes that cross state boundaries. With rate exceptions, domestic violence cases do not. Agencies exist to enforce the laws of Congress. That if their entire reason for existing.

OTOH, most corporate crimes do cross state boundaries and thus are within the jurisdiction of both state and federal authorities.

With respect to cigarettes, the product itself doesn't kill people. There are people that live for decades smoking multiple times a day. The secondary effects kill many people, but there isn't a sufficiently strong correlation to ban cigarettes outright.

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