> The US already has a huge list of government regulations and people paid to do nothing but regulate industry. Those industries currently poisonthe air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Are we to assume that regulation would work if we only have more than today, or that regulation didn't work despite how much we've thrown into it already?
The argument is that those regulations result in those conditions being currently better than they would be without, and we can look at history to see that this is in fact the case.
Would you expect effective government regulation to be perfectly successful, otherwise it’s deemed useless and might as well be gotten rid of? Do we hold any other pursuit by humans to the same standard?
> Would you expect effective government regulation to be perfectly successful, otherwise it’s deemed useless and might as well be gotten rid of? Do we hold any other pursuit by humans to the same standard?
There's a huge gap between what we have today and perfect regulation. Would you consider what the US has today, with all the issues of regulatory capture and revolving doors, as close enough to perfect that its reasonable to impose the regulations on us and limit our freedoms along the way?
I'm not proposing the anarchist, wild west pipe dream. I'm simply saying that we shouldn't so easily assume that our regulations that are questionably successful today would be better if only we doubled down on them. We can go the route of more regulation, moving responsibility off of industry and onto the government, or we can go the opposite and remove regulations while also removing liability protections. Allow companies to feel the pain of bad decisions and allow customers to make informed decisions rather than asking people to blindly trust experts that say something is safe enough, good enough for the environment, etc.
What the US has today is inarguably better than what we had before regulation. That is worth retaining and reinforcing, and it makes no sense to undo the regulation and go back to what was verifiably worse.
This debate doesn't have to happen in the realm of hypothesis and ideology, it’s all in the historical record, simply look at the abuses of industry during the 19th and 20th century before the institution of various forms of regulation of those industries.
Pure Food and Drug Act, preventing countless deaths from adulterated products.
Clean Air Act, from 1970 led to a 78% drop in air pollutants to date. Think LA 1970s vs now. Think Beijing vs NYC or any major American or European metropolitan/industrial center.
The Clean Water Act meant we stopped having Ohio's rivers catch fire. Lead paint regulations reduced the percentage of young children with elevated blood lead levels from 88% in the 1970s to 0.5% in 2016.
Look right now around the world at the behavior of companies operating in parts of the developing world where there is a dramatically reduced or nonexistent regulatory standard in terms of things like labor law, environmental protection, and consumer safety.
Corporations would love if the only recourse was lawsuits that they could spend literal decades repeatedly appealing in court, allowing them to reap massive profits in the short term while delaying any concrete penalties, if any, into the indefinite future, and frequently having those final penalties, again if any, represent a small fraction of their profits from the behaviors in question.
"Let companies murder people, poison people, abuse people, and irreversibly devastate the world, then let people try to sue them after the fact" is such a transparently terrible strategy for organizing a society.
We've already run this experiment of regulation vs no regulation countless times over two centuries. The default state of the world is one without regulation, and that's what we had at the dawn of industrialization and that's what still we have now in many parts of the developing world.
The horrors that constantly and predictably result are the entire reason for the emergence of regulation to protect people from the inevitable tendency of industries to produce negative externalities.
> Corporations would love if the only recourse was lawsuits that they could spend literal decades repeatedly appealing in court, allowing them to reap massive profits in the short term while delaying any concrete penalties, if any, into the indefinite future, and frequently having those final penalties, again if any, represent a small fraction of their profits from the behaviors in question.
This is also what we have today though. Companies get away with terrible actions until the public and eventually politicians catch on and have to act. Said action is often extremely slow and a slap on the wrist compared to the profits gained and damages caused by the companies.
How is DuPont still around after knowingly poisoning groundwater in parts of the eastern US? Regulators looked the other way, or were completely oblivious.
How is Fair Life still producing milk? Regulators clearly have seen the same reporting the public has, they either just don't care or are okay with the animal abuse as long as we get pasturized milk.
The list of companies getting away with egregious actions while supposedly under strict regulations is endless.
We can't say what a deregulated market would look like today, so much has changed since we started aggressively regulating industry. We also can't say, though, that what we have today clearly works better than the alternative with so many examples of what companies still get away with despite all of our regulatory agencies and their budgets.
The argument is that those regulations result in those conditions being currently better than they would be without, and we can look at history to see that this is in fact the case.
Would you expect effective government regulation to be perfectly successful, otherwise it’s deemed useless and might as well be gotten rid of? Do we hold any other pursuit by humans to the same standard?