> Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face.
We have a problem where regulators are bad at their jobs most of the time, and then people develop the heuristic that all regulation is bad.
You need some rules to price major externalities. Not minor externalities, because regulatory overhead and enforcement are themselves externalities and it doesn't do any good to burn $1 in overhead to prevent $0.90 in some other cost. But you want a ban on leaded gasoline.
And you need antitrust rules, because "the market is more efficient" is fundamentally predicated on competitive markets. Real competition is the sine qua non of that actually working. Most government inefficiency is because the government is a monopoly, and private monopolies are just as bad.
The problem is politics breaks everyone's brains. One party says "regulation good" and the other side says "regulation bad" before either of them considers what the regulation actually does. And then you have one party promoting illiterate nonsense like price controls or justifying busybodies who want to micromanage things they don't even understand or trusting the government with mass surveillance data just because they're not a private company, and on the other side you have people with no objections to tying arrangements or companies with double-digit market share buying even more of their competitors.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler." That last bit turns out to be kind of important.
> We have a problem where regulators are bad at their jobs most of the time, and then people develop the heuristic that all regulation is bad.
No, we have a problem where 95% of regulations work so well that no one even remembers that they exist (child labor, etc). A media environment that reports on outliers for clicks and corporations that want to dump industrial waste in rivers.
> No, we have a problem where 95% of regulations work so well that no one even remembers that they exist (child labor, etc).
This is quite false. There are a few regulations that have a high cost/benefit ratio (e.g. ban leaded gasoline), and a few that are completely upside down (e.g. DMCA 1201), and then there are the vast majority which are the regulatory bureaucrat equivalent of busy work and are neutral at best. Positions exist to make new regulations, so they make new regulations.
But each new one has overhead, and then we get cost disease and high cost of living and increased market consolidation because regulatory compliance is a fixed cost that large corporations can bear more easily than smaller companies, and the complexity is used to disguise corruption. All of that is legitimately bad.
90% of them are completely worthless, and it's a significant problem that we have an apparatus structured to perpetually accumulate new ones without ever going back and cleaning house to remove the ones that can't be justified.
> There are a few regulations that have a high cost/benefit ratio (e.g. ban leaded gasoline),
I think you mean to say that it had a very low cost/benefit. Otherwise, citation seriously needed.
Right winger says problem is government. Left winger says problem is corporations. Repeat ad nauseum. Yes both can be bad.
95% of regulations and 95% of companies work so fantastically that nobody realizes they exist. Sure.
But re: regulation, that 5% tends to be in the really really important stuff.
How’s housing…and healthcare… and higher education…and the national debt…in the US going?
All of those things make up vastly more than 5% of the economy and are arguably all broken in the US because of poorly designed regulation.
I think assuming most regulation is “good” is an extremely dangerous proposition given regulation is extremely difficult to change or overturn once in place.
It’s important to also remember every regulation requires enforcement at gunpoint. You cannot choose to not follow them.
Your whole comment is good but I want to signal boost the most important point you made.
Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient. Take the worst DMV office in the world and put it in charge of something way more important than license plates.
> Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient.
It's kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other. You can't vote out a monopolist, but unless there is a law against competing with them, there is a threshold for how bad they can get before somebody actually does. The problem is that threshold can be way past the point of anywhere you want to be.
Whereas governments can get even worse because if you resist their unreasonableness they declare you a criminal and resort to violence and you can't go to the police because they are the police. Voting can mitigate this, but there are governments without democracy, democratic governments that are structurally insulated from accountability in practice (see US incumbency rate and Congress abdicating its role to unelected regulatory bureaucrats), and even in a pure direct democracy you still have two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
What you want is neither of these things.
> but unless there is a law against competing with them
Ah, but that is why the monopoly uses its considerable resources to lobby passing laws that at least make it more difficult for someone to compete with them.
And then we're back to "the government should be restrained from passing that sort of economic regulation because otherwise that's what happens".