Except when we’re talking about basic necessities.
And note that I mentioned “informed.” Without government regulation mandating transparency, how exactly am I supposed to be informed about a company’s practices? Not to mention that, again, seeking this information out adds to the overhead of non-productive shit I gotta do just to survive, much less actually accomplish something with my time.
That’s the only government you can have, there is no perfect government. So take a look through history at what those imperfections do (or scroll back to the OP). Bridges fall down, economies get destroyed, multiple foreign wars paid for through deficit spending get fought, and a shitload of people get food poisoning because of a shitload of shit in the food supply.
The government is imperfect, meaning that the things you so blindly and blissfully trust are based on imperfect actions. The problem is that you guys treat it as if it’s perfect. You assume all those federal interstate bridges have been inspected (they weren’t). You assume all the restaurants have been inspected (maybe every 6 months). You assume your drinking water has been tested (it wasn’t).
What ever aspect you pick, be it the financial sector or food industry, the presence of those imperfect actions gave a false sense of security that allowed complexity and growth. Now your typical hamburger contains beef from hundreds of cows, cut up and repackaged so that you don’t know if it contains meat from a good cow or a bad one. Mortgage backed securities oddly enough used the same practice…
Do you know what the current allowable deviation is? Do you know accurate the pumps are?
The very simply point that you refuse to acknowledge is that if a gas station wanted to operate without government regulations, it would have to convince you that you are getting what you paid for, otherwise you wouldn’t buy from them.
There is no reason what so ever to trust them, and apparently measuring the volume of a liquid is complicated, so to be able to sell gas, a station would have to come up with a way to show that you are getting what you paid for. That proof would be profitable, assuming that people give a shit.
If a guy wants to sell spinach out of the back of his truck, he’ll have to figure out a way for you to trust that he’s not poisoning you. Likewise, he’ll need a way to figure out if the gold coins you gave him are pure.
As someone just mentioned, look at the drug trade. It operates not just without government regulation, but in spite of it. Trust is a huge issue, and violating that trust means death. A street dealer needs his customers to live long enough for him to make money. The poor people he kills the less money he makes, and oddly enough most of the drug trade is buy word of mouth.
Oh, for that matter, what’s to prevent the car companies and gas companies from conspiring to tweak the fuel gauges in the cars they make? Without the National Institute of Standards and Technology (part of the government; boo, hiss), who’s to say what this “gallon” thing really is?
I know the government is imperfect, and I said as much in the exact fucking sentence fragment you quoted.
I’m sure it would make things easier on you to debate the things you think I’ve said, but that’s not the way it works around here.
So now I’m not only paying for a gallon of gas, I’m also paying someone else (you said they’d turn a profit) to verify that it is, in fact, a gallon.
Is this all in the cause of streamlining and simplifying things?
Except that information is currently available and no one gives a shit. When was the last time you saw the food license for a restaurant? Assume you’ve been to a restaurant. If you should end up in one again some day, ask to see it. Then ask about their food safety practices. Ask to see their HACCP plan.
I think what scares you guys the most is the fact that people just don’t give a shit. As an example, there was/is a huge food court in Toronto’s Chinatown district that had massive health code violations. Eventually the city shut it down, and people were sad! The customers knew about the health problems but ate their anyways.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
That’s what you do now, pay a fee to an imperfect government in the form of taxes, which are involuntary. For some reason you trust the government to do that, even though they’ve done nothing to prove they’re capable, and once found incapable there is nothing you can do to fix it.
If the government can’t be arsed to inspect federal interstate highway bridges, what makes you think they’ll put any more effort into verifying gas pumps? And like the problem with that peanut company, the government only inspects stations that file the paperwork. So, have you ever bothered to verify if the station you go to has been inspected? How would you know? Do you know if that inspector is competent or corrupt?
On one final note: why are cigarettes legal?
The government knows they’re carcinogenic, it knows they cause death and disease. Why does the government continue to allow us to buy cigarettes?
And with them legal, why do people smoke? Everyone know knows that they’re carcinogenic, it knows they cause death and disease. Yet 48.2 million people smoke.
It’s a substance that people KNOW will poison them. It’s a substance the government knows will poison them. People don’t need their own testing lab to verify that it’s poisonous. Yet you guys are worried about spinach?
You claim that the government is looking out for our best interests, prove it.
See, these debates boil down to you guys coming up with whatever fanciful example you can of how the private market could be cheating you, along with ignoring any of the possible ways the market might prevent it, and assume that that makes your case. But anyone can do that with anything.
For example, I can flip the gas example right around on you: I had a friend who worked for the government as an inspector for fuel pumps. He was an 20 year old guy and it was one of his first jobs. Don’t you think it would be easier to bribe someone like him to write down the wrong number? It’s not like bribing government inspectors is unheard of. So why not?
And I suppose everyone ignored my point about brand value, huh? Do you really think Esso or Mohawk is going to risk destroying their reputations by cheating customers on .01 gallon of gas?
And if that control isn’t good enough, if this were a real problem how long do you think it would take before some private company or consumer organization goes around and measures gas with a graduated cylinder and publishes the results so people can find out who’s cheating?
And if this is really a problem, how come quantities aren’t fudged like this all over the place? The government makes sure that gas pumps are certified, but it doesn’t do the same for the quantity of liquid in a milk carton or the number of screws in a box of screws, or any number of other quantities that are measured out by private industry and sold. Is there an epidemic of short-changing you’ve heard about?
Again… Why do car companies so greatly exceed minimum federal safety standards? Why do cars have six airbags instead of just the two frontal ones mandated by law? Why are so many vehicles including backup cameras, when the government hasn’t yet mandated them? Why did ABS brakes become standard before the government mandated them? How does the SCUBA industry have such an enviable safety and product quality record despite an almost total lack of government oversight? How come brand name food is tastier and packaged better than no-name food, despite both being under exactly the same government standards?
Answers to these questions might give you some insight into how the market regulates the behavior of companies, but you’d rather ignore them because they raise uncomfortable questions and instead focus on inventing more ways in which private companies might cheat you or cherry-picking a handful of cases of real malfeasance and using that to smear the entire market, while of course hand-waving away the numerous failures of government regulation and the sometimes-widespread corruption of the inspection process.
Actually, yes it does. That’s why I don’t want an unregulated society. People will kill themselves in droves.
So since large companies corrupt the inspection process to get ahead, it’s better to eliminate the inspectors entirely and cut out the middle man? 
This is absolutely false. Taxes are paid voluntarily. Or is it your claim that you do not choose to live here? Are you not free to move to, say, Somalia, if you want to? Who is preventing you from moving?
You pay taxes because you choose to continue living in a country where people pay taxes. It’s your choice.
Yes. One fee, once a year (that I need to bother with) to one entity that oversees weights and measures, agricultural safety standards, drug effectiveness and epidemiology, patents, air safety, ports and waterways, forestry and park lands, utilities, flood control, and communications spectrum. (And if any other dopers would care to add things I’ve forgotten, please do.) If you would like the opportunity to shop around and buy all those services a la carte, that’s up to you. (Might want to hire someone else to check up on them, too.)
They’ve done nothing to prove they’re capable? I found a cite that there are 54,663 bridges in the interstate highway system, and I can only remember one of them falling. That’s not much consolation to the families of those who died, I’m sure, but if you can find a private company with a 99.998% success rate, I’d sure like to hear about it. When was the last time a plane crash made news in the United States? The FAA and NTSB are doing a kickass job.
They have six airbags because the car companies think that will help them sell more cars and turn a bigger profit, whether those extra airbags actually make people any safer or not.
Better hire someone to check up on the appraisers, too.
Turtles all the way down.
Fanciful? Hell, it happened at my local gas station a few years back. Guess who caught 'em? Go on, take a shot. You’ll never guess, because it doesn’t fit into your “Government is always evil” philosophy.
I am mostly on the side of the libertarians, but I do see value in enforcing the accuracy of information. So I am passionately opposed to campaign finance reform as it is practiced, but I do think full disclosure of donors is reasonable. I have my issues with the FDA, but I would like to see enforcement of truth in advertising.
One of the most absurd regulatory environments is the nearly universal regulation of taxi cabs. It is a hotbed of corruption that does nothing for the passengers and lines the pockets of corrupt minor officials everywhere. The cab drivers can’t make a living because they have to buy a medallion at grossly inflated prices. Getting a ride from Dulles airport to home costs $80 bucks when a willing driver would gladly take me for $40. Government limits the number of cabs available inflating the price of cab medallions and the cost of each ride for urban residents everywhere, and to what end? I am not going to take an unmarked cab, I know to ask the price for my destination and government could still require prices to be posted and cab drivers names to be posted. All government needs to do is ensure that the consumer have access to information, but it has been in the best interest of the cab companies to collude with government to distort the market in their favor.
That’s an especially interesting example, because when you land at Dulles or Newark one of the first things you notice is the number of unlicensed taxi cab drivers whispering in your ear, or flagging you down, as you come out of baggage claim.
Why are they there? Are we to suppose that nobody has ever contracted with them, since operating an unlicensed cab is illegal? We know it’s illegal, since it says so right on the wall.
If nobody has ever contracted with them, why have there been 20+ drivers standing out there every time I’ve landed at Newark for the past 15 years? They would have starved to death by now for lack of food, if they hadn’t been contracting with somebody for some amount of money.
So we must assume that a number of voluntary transactions have occurred over many years that incent those drivers to keep coming back. And yet, we have created an artificial class of criminals out of enterprising drivers because of…well, just for the hell of it. Because the taxicab companies have lobbied the government to protect them from competition.
So artificially low interest rates, and a subsidized housing boom via Freddie and Fannie, was an example of the government “stopping” something? I didn’t realize that word meant what you think it does.
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.