He did.
He said he’d fix it.
He has.
Just that people who weren’t listening really closely thought that would mean he’d fix the banks, when what he really meant was he’d fix Hillary’s attachment to the banks.
Well according to libertarian doctrine, your executors can sue the restaurant.
The Restaurant hired the most qualified bacterial scientists (actually mathematicians in the finance industry) to “prove” to everyone how safe the meat was. Except none of us are high enough level bacterial scientists to know how to interpret the analysis. Also the restaurant pays the salary of the health inspectors. If they give a bad rating they don’t get hired anymore.
In private for-profit courts.
I’m sure the citizens of Libertopia will be fully informed of the facts by all the articles in the Libertopia Times and… wait, what?.. they’ve just been bought by the Meat Producers Consortium? Oh, well… I’m sure it’ll be in the best business interests of the newly-renamed Libertopia Time for Meats to report all the facts regardless. They have to! Journalistic ethics!
The banks are going to be de-regulated. Dodd-Frank will be gutted because the Gilded Age republicans want it to be, and there just aren’t that many republicans left who support any form of regulation where the market is concerned. The republican party today is like that of the late 19th and early 20th century, or like the Jacksonian Democrats. Trump wants lower taxation and regulation because he has a financial stake in promoting such legislation.
As I’ve said we’re going back to the 19th century. By the time Trump and the republicans are done fucking America social security, medicare, medicaid, and all forms of government assistance will be negligible if not extinct. We’ll have been to bust cycles. The first boom will probably begin in January. It could be a good 2-4 year ride, perhaps just long enough to get Trump or his successor elected again. But the crash will come, and when it does, there will be no way FDIC (assuming it still exists) can prevent the soup kitchens and bread lines from forming - not when a handful of banks own 70 percent of all accounts. 2008 will look like a 6 month recession compared to what comes next.
Why couldn’t they bribe the government health inspectors, just as easily?
Maybe they do.
There are two types of “health inspectors” (i.e., securities regulators), (1) private ones (like Standard & Poor’s or Moody’s who need to give daily blow jobs to the investment banks to retain their business), and (2) the government “health inspectors” (the SEC) who
(a) can’t really enforce any regulations with teeth because there are no regulations with any teeth,
(b) don’t seem to do much of anything, and,
(c) seem to get really good jobs in investment banks when they retire from the SEC. Is that bribery? Who the fuck knows, but it smells bad.
I agree. So why would you pay attention to anything they say?
Make your own choices with your money, enjoy the freedom that you have, and hold yourself accountable for your own behavior.
It’s not really any more complicated than that. For eating at a restaurant or choosing to do business with a bank.
For the life of me, I can never understand why people don’t (1) trust themselves or (2) use the data and signals provided to them by self-interested, private parties but (3) are willing to put 100% of their faith in a government official, whom they’ve never met and most assuredly does not have their interests at heart.
It’s their own form of religion, I guess.
You’re a qualified and degreed bacteriologist, carrying a bacteriological lab around with you at all times?
And, for what it’s worth, why do you automatically assume he “most assuredly does not have their interests at heart” when that is exactly what his job is?
Maybe it’s a form of religion for some people.
I admire your libertarian outlook. Here’s the thing though, when it comes to the world economy we are all in the same boat (though the rich people have higher cabins than the poor who are below the waterline). Now, a few of the passangers in first class brought along their shotguns for drunken skeet party and are blowing holes in the hull. For fun. They almost sank the ship, and killed a few poor people who were below the water line.
Do we stay seated and mind our own business while they continue the skeet shooting party? The boat government doesn’t care too much – everytime one of them goes up to first class to complain about the noise they are invited in to the party, given a drink and the party goes on.
The boat police can’t do anything because technically no laws have been broken.
The holes in the hull need to be plugged up so the government is paying for it with our taxes.
What can be done?
So, we’re discussing two situations. One, the real world, there are serious legal penalties for both someone trying to bribe a government official, and for government officials who take bribes.
In the other situation, the hypothetical “Libertopia,” there’s absolutely no legal penalty to hiring a “health inspector” and paying him enough to certify your restaurant, even if your kitchen is basically a giant cockroach nest.
And you can’t figure out why it’d be easier to get away with shit in the second scenario than in the first?
I’m fine with holding myself accountable for my own behavior. What I want is other people to be held to account for their behavior. If I eat at a restaurant, and the cook poisons me, that’s not my behavior at fault, that’s the cook’s. What mechanism is he going to be held accountable under, in this system?
It’s worth noting that this is not something you’ve ever, in your life, actually had to do for yourself. Every business entity you’ve ever interacted with, in your entire life, has been regulated out the wazoo. You literally have no idea what would be necessary for you to personally ensure your safety in every single business transaction, because you’ve never been in a situation where you actually needed to do that, and you have no way of knowing that whatever methods you tell yourself are keeping you safe are actually effective, because you’ve never tried them in a society where there weren’t significant regulations on the businesses with which you interacted.
Mostly, it’s a grounded knowledge about what was life before there was widespread health and safety regulations, and a strong desire not to let society regress to that point.
There are so many of your assertions above that are patently untrue, I don’t even know where to begin.
“Every business that I’ve ever interacted with, has been regulated out the wazoo.”
Really? Like this website? What is regulated about the time and content your are putting on this website?
Good grief.
The two easiest examples I can think of are the FDA and EBay.
I suspect you feel safe eating in restaurants in the USA because you believe some government official, or some “regulation out the wazoo”, is keeping you safe. Not the restaurant owner’s self interest. Or your own self interest in selecting certain places based on trusted recommendations or a brand. I would argue its the 2 latter, and not the former. But I won’t argue that. At least not for the moment.
Let’s stipulate that the FDA, or food inspectors, or something, is keeping you safe from the dastardly restaurant owners who are trying to kill you. For the moment.
Have you ever travelled overseas? Have you ever travelled to 3rd world countries on vacation? I suspect that you and many Dopers have.
Do you fast whilst you’re there? Do you starve yourself? The FDA is not there. There is no controlling American government authority there. Do you eat? Why? You might die, according to your logic. Are you arguing that the Mexican or Ugandan or Thai authorities are looking out for your best interests, and keeping small mom-and-pop operators on the straight and narrow?
I suspect that if you travel overseas, you do eat at branded restaurants, or at places provided by a trusted recommendation, or someplace discussed in Lonely Planet or Fodors. Just a hunch.
Why is that OK? But we’ll all die, unless the FDA and food inspectors protect us from evil American restaurantuers? And bankers.
The 2nd example is Ebay. Ebay didn’t even exist until about 20 years ago. Today, 10s of billions of dollars of transactions happen between private individuals. Hell, most of the time the sellers are nameless avatars and you can’t even touch and see the products. Yet it thrives and persists.
How is that possible? Is Ebay “regulated out the wazoo”? For God’s sake, automobiles and airplanes are sold on Ebay. How is that possible? How can it continue?
When you are done praying to your God of Government Oversight, I’d like to hear a couple of alternative viewpoints. I always enjoy a good debate.
Your analogy lost me a little.
Why are you in the boat with them, in the first place?
If they are armed, why aren’t you? If they start shooting the joint up and threatening you, why don’t you shoot them dead to protect yourself?
Sorry…that’s the best I can do. You lost me in the translation.
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No.
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I don’t.
But I don’t see what that has to do with anything. We are both free to make judgments as to whether we desire, or trust, “qualified and degreed” people or not. Just because they are “qualified and degreed” by some institution, doesn’t mean that I nor you need to follow their advice. We can. Or we can’t. It’s up to us. Not to them.
Same for point 2.
You seem to have forgotten to actually refute anything in what Miller said.
You are aware that pretty much every other country has some organization that regulates their food, right?
It’s not so much a refutation. It’s a question. To you, and him.
So when you go to Mexico, and wander a little off the main hotel strip to get a taco or a drink, you think to yourself “Thank God for the Mexican food inspection authorities! They are keeping me safe!”
Really? You really believe that? If so, than I will re-iterate my accusation that your religion is the God of Government. You must believe that they will protect you. Because you clearly believe you are not capable of protecting yourself.
Why do you believe they will save you, and not yourself? Why are you willing to place the decision-making authority with others, and not yourself?
Putting food into your body seems like a pretty important decision. The same with ingesting drugs. Or perhaps, seeking medical care.
Why are you so willing to delegate the oversight of that decision to someone else? Why wouldn’t you prefer to keep that oversight to yourself?
Yes. Focusing on bad food served by restaurants misses the whole point of economic externalities — they are external to the transaction. The paper sold by the Koch’s Georgia-Pacific is fine — its customers have no reason to look elsewhere. It’s people unrelated to the transaction who live downstream from the polluter’s paper plant that wish they could move elsewhere.
And what are you paying for the time and content he’s putting on this website? (Did you miss the word “business” in what you quoted?)
Yep.
For starters, most transactions on eBay take place through credit cards, debit cards, and bank transfers, all of which are heavily regulated (both by the governments involved and by the credit card processors and others in the industry). If you are instead sending a check through the mail, the postal authorities in the sending and receiving jurisdictions have regulations on that–in the U.S., for example, the Postal Inspection Service has secured criminal convictions over eBay scams.
If you are buying or selling an automobile on eBay, you are still transacting that business under the laws of one or more jurisdictions, each of which have regulations governing things like merchantability and fraud, and each of which has one or more enforcement authorities for those regulations.
Try actually reading the eBay User Agreement, for example–any dispute you have with eBay is governed by the laws of the State of Utah, and if you buy or sell on eBay, you have agreed to submit to the personal jurisdiction of the state and/or federal courts in Salt Lake County, Utah.
The fact that eBay is a new venue for sales does not negate or eliminate the centuries of case law and regulation surrounding sales. Why would you think it does?
I notice that you’re a guest here, so you don’t actually have a business relationship with this board.
As for what’s regulated, well, you see that tiny little R up there between the “P” and the “E” in “THE STRAIGHT DOPE.” That’s a copyright symbol. By law, this is the only website on the internet that can call itself The Straight Dope. Copyright law also applies to what you post here in ways that I honestly don’t fully understand, because I’m not a copyright lawyer. But if you try to post the entire text of a Stephen King novel here, that’s against the law. It’s also against the law for Stephen King to publish a book consisting of nothing but stuff you’ve posted on the Straight Dope. There are also general restrictions on speech. Libel laws apply here as much as they do anywhere else. If you have some sort of government clearance, laws about what you can do with classified information apply here. We’ve got the Marketplace forum, which brings in truth in advertising laws to at least some extent. If we allowed images on the board, you could be arrested for posting child porn - and we could be arrested if we let it stay.
My trips out of the country have mostly been to western Europe (and Canada) where they have equivalent, if not stronger, regulatory bodies. I’ve never traveled in the third world, precisely because I don’t want to vacation in a place where you can’t drink the tap water. But if you have, good for you. I withdraw my broad statement that you’ve never interacted with an unregulated business before.
Have you been to the third world?
Nope. Also incorrect about how I pick my restaurants domestically.
(Actually, the first time I went to London, I did eat at a McDonalds. You know what they say about British food? It’s true, and it applies to their fast food franchises. I didn’t know it was actually possible to make McNuggets worse.)
Well, we will all die, regardless of what we do. Notice how people in industrialized nations tend to live longer than people in the third world? That’s partly because we eat a lot less contaminated food and water.
Yes. Yes it is. You can, as you say, sell a car on eBay. Here’s their page’o’links to all the various state and federal laws with which you are expected to comply to sell a car on eBay. (Make sure you’re not selling so many that your state might classify you as a dealer, though! Here’s their page on what weapons can and cannot be sold, legally, on eBay. Here, appropriately enough, is their list of regulations on selling food. I believe their page on selling human organs is just a big “DON’T”.
And for good measure, here’s an article about how eBay has been successfully lobbying to have a lot of these regulations appealed.
Groovy. Out of curiosity, what is a “maule,” anyway?