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Comment by tadfisher | Hacker News Reader

He and his ilk forget all too quickly why we have regulations in the first place. People wanted them, because they were tired of polluted waterways, bank runs wiping away their life savings, and dangerous poisons being sold as medicine. Now that a functioning democracy has voted for privacy protections, it's a pretty "mask-off" moment that these regulations are the ones he rails against.

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It wasn't that the people requesting certain things politely that brought regulation. It was when things turned nonprofitable or outright violent. The New Deal was the ideal of Roosevelt but other politicians knew very well what people did to the Tsar and his family. It didn't end well for them but it did scare quite a lot developed governments in the world.

Conflating bureaucratic red tape with regulations that actually protect citizens is the deceitful, immoral strategy, by people who are basically... evil.

Simplifying bureaucratic rules can be beneficial and can take countless forms (digitizing trivial manual work, removing duplication, applying materiality thresholds etc. etc.) The result is clearly a win-win for all.

Removing protective regulations is instead a zero sum game. Each fradulent bank behavior not persecuted is siphoning wealth from their clients. Each further exploitation of personal data collection is enriching the surveillance capitalists at the expense of the user-product (and ultimately our very democracies).

Society and politics has a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.

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