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Comment by incompatible | Hacker News Reader

The low-regulation approach seem great until you find out how far businesses will go to cut their costs and increase profits: you end up with situations like flammable cladding installed on high-rise towers, horse meat sold as beef, or bleach sold as a cure for Covid-19 (one of these may be fictional). The line between legitimate business and scam becomes impossible to define.

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This is not a problem of regulation, but a problem of law enforcement; there is no need or regulation "don't sell horse meat as beef", but to remove the US legal system plague of settlements where companies pay money to get rid of investigations and claim "they have no fault".

I know a real case of horse meat sold as beef in UK and they have lots of regulations (including the EU on top of local). You can put all the rules and laws in the book, but don't just relax and hope all will be obeyed. As some SCOTUS decision stated a while ago, some laws and regulations are made so dense and confusing it is almost impossible to comply to the letter - they were talking about something as simple as driving a car on a public road.

Um, you can't have law enforcement without laws to enforce...

The law that applies/ought to apply is the one against fraud in the beef example.

By the time the fraud has been discovered and the company has been successfully sued, the owners will have long moved on, leaving behind nothing but a shell with ownership registered in the Cayman Islands. (Lax regulation of companies is also part of deregulation).

In any case there are other areas of regulation, such as environmental protection. What will happen when those are relaxed?

I have the feeling that the survey discussed in the original article is overgeneralizing from narrow questions of regulation eg. surge pricing, labor markets, etc., and that the so-called liberaltarians probably would be far less skeptical of financial, environmental, & safety regulations, & would generally like to see more vigorous enforcement even when they don't want want more regulations.

One must first outline what “beef” is before you can assign fraud. Outlining what makes something “beef” is textbook regulation.

In the common law system it would be up to a judge to make an estimation if such a question should happen. This is how common law operated for a long time. This allows judgment on a case by case bases where the judge can react to changing circumstances.

It has many advantages compared to a system where the government to literally pre-define every single thing in the economy and create specific regulation and test procedures for it, even if in most cases these things are not needed.

We tried that system and it evolved into what we have today because there were obvious holes. The FDA didn’t create itself. Muckraking journalists (like Upton Sinclair) shines a light on the conditions which led Theodore Roosevelt to create the FDA.

Acting like the world of judicial regulation (which takes years and lots of money to see through) was somehow better seems like rose-colored glasses. Whether the FDA’s scope should be adjusted is a different discussion.

Making public policy based on a popular novel that didn't even claim to be totally accurate.

Food quality was improving before FDA was established and continued rising after as well. Most quality improvement is driven by consumer demand that was the case before and after FDA.

Nobody said the policy was based on a book not is anyone advocating for it, that’s an obvious straw man.

Your mention of “quality improvement” is another slight of hand as that’s not really the FDA’s purpose nor do you support it with sources. Show some data for food (and drug) safety preceding and following the FDA and we can discuss.

Wouldn't a law against using flammable building materials always be considered "regulation"?

I never said there should be no regulations at all, just that some regulations are not needed or excessive. For example, needing a training course, pass exams and have a professional license to sell flowers is stupid, while doing the same to drive a car is totally fine.

> some regulations are not needed or excessive

I think everyone belives this.

The challenge has always been finding the most useful laws, as well as preventing special interests and rent seeking.

Apologies, the context did not make that clear.

Lowering regulation does not mean no regulation. And outright fraud or misrepresentation would still be punished by the courts.

I feel like these debates are purely semantic. "low regulation" can mean anything.

The devil is always in the details. Every regulation is different.

The problems described in the parent comment exist now. Why should we lower regulation given that starting point?

Those things go under fraud and (depending on circumstances) negligence and under a free market system would be cause for collective legal legal. Free-market people have a quite sophisticated understanding of the law and how it constraints buissness, but nobody ever bothers to read or even understand that research.

If you look at British Common Law many of these problems have legal precedents that would be evolved based on real world cases.

This is what economist like Armen Alchian, James M. Buchanan, F.A. Hayek and many others have been arguing and researching for decades.

There are of course criticism to that approach, but to just dismiss it as if it didn't exist is not fair.

Regulations exist because you can't get a fraud conviction when the defendant says "I understand the meaning of the word "hamburger" differently from the plaintiff"

And then a judge says that this is not a valid excuse. That was kind of the point of judges.

Go look at how complex topics were handled in common law, often with very good understanding and solutions.

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