Oh my god. You’re totally right.
From now on I vow to inspect every bridge before I cross it, install my own gas lines, test my own food…
I’ll respond to the first six question marks in #150. I doubt if you re-read your own post as the questions were all rather silly. Feel free to ask six more questions, improving on their intelligence and sincerity, but I’m not going to respond indefinitely to mindless anger.
- Because they’re deceived and/or stupid. Was that really hard for you to figure out?
- My answer is serious. Was your question?
- Even if they’re not deceived or stupid, to buy things one doesn’t understand is commonplace. I just bought a Toyota hoping the Toyota dealer will know how to fix it if it fails … I don’t. G.W. Bush bought a trillion-dollar War. Did he understand it?
- That’s certainly not the only part of the case. Indeed, in the Libertarian Utopia as it has been explained at SDMB, clever rich property holders will be sueing each other regularly. (Do civil courts count as regulators?)
- You asked me to answer your questions so, yes, stupid people do get deceived. They’re not the only ones. I don’t think you’re clinically stupid, emacknight, yet you’re obviously deceived.
- In prior threads I’ve suggested changes to banking and finance practices and regulations that would probably have avoided the housing bubble and credit failure. I won’t try to synopsize them here. Oddly, part of the solution is to move toward a more natural democratic free market system, rather than the corrupt Greed-is-God system that has evolved in America due to rampant deregulation in the name of “liberty.”
This seems confusing. Explaining it will segue into an exposure of a major libertarian misconception:
Many of us like to imagine simpler days, perhaps in a small frontier town. We didn’t need any government inspecting Ma Blaine’s restaurant. She’d been serving us food for years and her kids played with our kids.
When the village fool tried to buy a house the banker might have told him “Technically you’ve got enough for the down payment, but you’re so gol-darn dumb I won’t help you on a house that’s so expensive.” He did help the Carlson family, though, when they wanted a new house because he’d seen with his own eyes how hardworking they were. The town was no “Utopia” but its natural free market worked fairly well, even without government agents wearing steenking badges.
But that economy is not this economy. During the housing bubble, bankers and brokers made loans they knew were no good, and sold them to unsuspecting investors. They functioned as middlemen moving money from a “stupid” lender to a “stupid” borrower, and awarding themselves a generous commission on the mediated stupidities. At its peak, America’s industry of financial shenanigans was making more profits than steel, coal, shipping, and auto manufacturing combined. Co-opted Congressmen saw the young bankers driving Ferraris and reasoned from the Greed is God Postulate of Libertarianism that unregulated “modern” financial markets were a Godsend to America.
I think many “Libertarians” visualize that small town where we didn’t need no government agents with steenking badges to trust Ma Blaine’s restaurant. Such nostalgia can produce an uplifting emotion, and there is wisdom to be found in past truths.
But let’s not use a pretend frontier Fantasyland to set policy in our era.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea to inspect a few bridges since the government can’t be bothered
Only AFTER the bridge fall that they bothered to go around looking at the dozen or so identical bridges and learn that those too were faulty. Their excuse? Lack of funding. Always a lack of funding. More in the next post:
The position put forth in this pit thread is that without regulations (in libertarian utopia) they’ll be “glass in burritos,” and a spate of food poisoning in restaurants."
Now, this is presented as a case against libertarian policies suggesting that we need regulations to keep glass out of burritos and prevent food poisoning. Problem is that regulations have failed to do that.
So you’re saying it’s ALL the fault of evil corporations? Never the fault of corrupt and incompetent government (ie the regulators)?
Yup, and here we are, regulations only work if they are funded correctly. Except they are never funded correctly. By the very definition if something slips past regulators it’s BECAUSE of a lack of funding (see 35W bridge above). Which to me means that you can never have an effective regulation because you can never have sufficient funding. Why through good money after bad?
And to that I say recognize that corporations are cheaters. They have a profit motive to cheat. Oddly enough, no one seems to care that customers also have a profit motive to cheat. Point is, there is no reason what so ever to expect a mortgage broker NOT to cheat. It’s right there in play sight, they are paid per mortgage, and have no attachment to the debt. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The high school drop out, the securities trader, and the pension fund manager should have started with the presumption that mortgage brokers were cheaters. There was no reason to take their word for it that the mortgage was good. But that’s what people did, millions of them, over and over, until pop.
The expression needed here is “trust but verify.”
Sounds to me like you see government as a fat, gluttonous beast that is never sated, while I see it as an underfed mongrel that is given only barely enough to survive, and that grudgingly. The link you posted doesn’t change that opinion, only reinforces it. If they did have sufficient funding, they could have repaired the bridge and the other 75,000 bridges in the US that were rated as structurally deficient.
It’s a bad state of affairs when infrastructure can’t even catch a break.
But what happens if the government puts in the wrong regulations and thousands of jobs are lost? What about all those poor workers that are now without income because the government fucked up.
I already cited the case of the US banning imports of Canadian beef and potatoes. Now the Russians are doing the same thing, pretending to regulate by throwing up their hands and banning “all vegetable from Europe.”
So, here’s my personal take on the “free market” response: Assuming there is some sort of free press, people in Russia hear about the outbreak, they freak out, and stop buying “produce from Europe.” Or the decide they don’t care and continue to buy it. That sends a pretty strong message to producers–don’t spread e. coli. Attempts will then be made to create a system of trust, along the lines of guarantees. Hyundai got labeled as a really shitty manufacturer that produced really shitty cars (I forget the name at the moment). They eventually cleaned up their act but people still wouldn’t buy from them, so they were the first to put forward an extremely long warranty. They reduced the level of risk to the purchaser. You see the same thing with used car dealers. There is no reason what so ever to trust them, or a mechanic. So now there are tons of them that offer very encompassing guarantees, with the obvious result that the cars cost a little more. If that’s worth it to you pay more, if not take the risk.
So let’s look back at the tainted dog food scandal and see how it played out: Lots of people freaked out and refused to buy dog food from China. They made lots of noise, the Chinese government was embarrassed. But eventually people forgot. Some now buy locally produced organic dog food, everyone else continues buying what ever is on sale without spending a second longer to look to see where it was made, who made it, what’s it made of, etc. Forget testing it themselves, they aren’t even willing to look on the package. The fucking thing could say, “contains poison and will kill dog” and they’d still buy it. You can’t fix stupid.
What this means is that for all the lip service people really don’t give a shit. Food safety isn’t that important to them, neither is airline safety. Planes keep crashing due to negligence but people keep buying tickets. When they go through security they bitch about the hassle.
I’ve seen sites that say as much as 40% of food poisoning occurs in the home. Shouldn’t the USDA and FDA be taking a larger role? Why aren’t residential homes inspected? Licensed? Shut down? Why aren’t parents required to take ServeSafe? The answer to all that is simple, people don’t actually care enough.
Orrrrr it could be that a single person’s improper food preparation only hurts a minimal number of people, while a restaurant feeds hundreds of people a day and a national chain that sells grocery products can reach thousands, if not millions. In addition, we recognize that there IS a limit beyond which the government shouldn’t intrude, and in the general case that limit is the property line. There’s some give and take between those two principles, but on the whole they work fairly well.
I’d love to see someone perform this sociological experiment: places like California and NY require restaurants to post the score from their inspection. If you took a popular place, and put an F in the window, how many people would walk right by and happily order?
If you had two bridges over the Mississippi, one a toll that pays for inspection, and one without a toll that is labeled, “use at your own risk” how many people would pay?
Regulations cost money. That is a very simple fact that everyone in this thread has seemed to ignore. It costs a lot of have health inspectors going around from restaurant to restaurant. And it’s already been admitted that regulations can’t reach 100% success. So we’re left looking at a curve of cost vs failure rate, and in my opinion as you put in more money you get very little reduction in the failure rate.
Right now food inspectors tend to visit a restaurant every 6 months. “High risk” kitchens (ie hospitals and nursing homes) 3 times per year. Bars and convenience stores once per year.
So once again I have to ask, how much are you personally willing to pay? How important is food safety to you? Two restaurants next to each other, one has a 10% surcharge to pay for government inspection, the other doesn’t.
All too often the same people asking for more regulations (and more funding) are the same people that also want to increase the top marginal tax rate. To me that says food safety is really important is someone else will pay for it, but otherwise they don’t give a shit.
Two things to note here: 1) libertarian utopia does not mean NO regulation, there wouldn’t be a constitutional amendment banning regulation the way there is one currently banning same sex marriage. 2) freedom means you get to choose for yourself how important food safety is. If it is very important you’ll pay more, if it isn’t you’ll pay less. When living/traveling in India there was always the choice of going to the tourist restaurant and paying more, or going to the local spot and paying less. No one is forcing you to go to either.
Speaking for myself personally I think we need an across-the-board raise, but given that even if I paid 75% in taxes 100 of me still wouldn’t be contributing as much as a single wealthy person paying out 30%, I do think there’s a ton of room to grow at the top. It’s not a question of hating the rich or not wanting to pay myself, it’s a question of ability. inb4 someone quotes ‘from each according’ blah blah
I’ve been fantasizing about winning the lottery lately, probably more than is healthy, and I frankly would have no problem giving up a straight 50% of the haul to El Gummint. Maybe that’s because it’s ill-gotten gains instead of working up from my first lucky dime, but it’s not like I wouldn’t take the hit myself if I could.
Er…what?
Which will do you a lot of good when your boss fires you for being gay, or demands that you provide him with sex as a condition of employment, or worse.
Because the poor are evil and deserve a slow death, right?
While I wouldn’t go that far, it’s very obvious that Libertaria, assuming it didn’t collapse entirely, would result in a vast gulf between the majority of the country living in early-20th-century-at-best squalor while the small percentage of people able to earn above a certain threshold live very well and comfortably.
The fewer regulations and redistributions there are, the wider and more dramatic the gulf between the haves and have-nots. This is a good thing for the haves, of course.
The solution to failed regulations is not to toss the regulations away and put your faith in the very people who bypassed the regulations in the first place.
And no, nobody is asking for PERFECT regulations that must therefore cost an INFINITE amount of money. Just because we can never achieve perfection is no reason to eliminate regulations in their entirety.
Because you’re not. You are achieving a large portion of public safety, along with the realization that nothing can be perfect, given limited resources to inspect, test etc.
Corporations cheat on food safety = hundreds or thousands die.
Consumers cheat = what exactly? They get a lower price on tomatoes?
That’s nice in theory. In reality, without tracking and testing of food, consumers would have no idea of why they were getting sick and dying. Food distribution companies would just slap a new label on the produce; “Product of Russia”. Really, without regulations, testing and some kind of enforcement, there is no bar to simply making as much money as possible, even if that means fertilizing your cucumber fields with human shit, killing thousands in the process.
Again, this goes back to the point of trust. You are absolutely correct that retailers would put what ever label on the product they think will get it to sell. So the question then becomes, why would you believe them? The result is that you start with the assumption the retailer is trying to scam you and work from there. Trust but verify.
Right now, why do you believe them? Origin labeling is a huge sham, because there always has to be a loophole and that loophole will always be exploited.
If consumers don’t trust the grocer, how is he supposed to get super rich? That’s the part you forgot. They want to make as much money as possible, and if proving country of origin is important to consumers they will provide it. Likewise, if consumers don’t give a shit about what shit is on their cucumber, the whole point is moot.
And once again I have to ask, how is it that people let their kids go out once a year and accept candy from strangers?
Again, great in theory, but I simply do not have the time or expertise to test every bite of food I take, every restaurant. I go to, every bridge I cross, every product I use, every means of transport I take, etc. etc. etc.
I trust because there is SOMETHING in place to protect me, and even if it is not perfect, it is very, very good. The government is not as ineffectual as libertarians like to paint it.
100% of every product does not have to be tested/examined 100% of the time for the system to work effectively. The presence of regulations and the possibility of enforcement and penalties function quite well most of the time. You seem to focus on the rare exception when it does not work, and then say “see! it does not work so we should dismantle the system!”
As of March 2011, 41 states prohibit same-sex marriage via statute or the state’s constitution.
Can anyone tell me how many lives are saved each year thanks to that regulation? Canada allowed it 6 years ago and I can’t seem to find any deaths that resulted.
Now, if you want an even better example look at the massive fuck up that was Prohibition. Based on the documentary I watched recently called* Boardwalk Empire* the government was just as, if not more, corrupt as private corporations. One hand washes the other.
There is no reason what so ever to trust the people making or enforcing regulations. They are not special, they are not saints. It’s not a case of Morlocks and Eloi, the same people work for both government and corporations, usually shifting back and forth as it suits their wallets.
If the government lacked the funds to inspect interstate bridges they should have shut down the bridges. As a result there is no reason to trust them any more than we should trust those evil money grubbing banks. That people continue to drive over them shows how little it actually matters to them.
God, you would let the nation burn if it meant you could keep your fucking money.
I would not call that a “regulation”, I’d call it a law based on a flawed premise that it will change anyone’s lives.
Nobody is saying that elected government always produces excellent laws that always produce an optimal social result.
However, throwing away food and safety regulations because some states don’t want gays to marry is… shall we say… a bit out there.
emacknight, you’ve been running on fallacy of the excluded middle all thread. You assume that because government can’t be perfect & is sometimes underfunded, that it can’t be good & will always want more money.
But it’s a vicious cycle:
Who calls for tax cuts? Libertarians!
What happens when inspectors and regulators can’t be paid? Layoffs, & less thorough inspections!
Whom do the libertarians blame when things go wrong? The deficiencies of the state!
Whom do everyone else blame? Libertarians & other anti-spending yokels.
I really want you all to have a nice Libertopia where you can fuck everything up & live in poverty & paranoia for the rest of your days, but I just can’t tell where on this planet it would be safe to let you.