What Chipotle did was a gamble–I guarantee you there are plenty of restaurants that have gotten away with the same sorts of stuff that tripped up this one chain. For example, the manager of one Chipotle restaurant allowed a sick employee to stay at work one day; it’s mostly bad luck that the one employee managed to infect 80 people with norovirus during the shift. If that employee had had a cold or PMS that day instead, allowing a sick employee to stay would have had few or no consequences.
In fact, Chipotle’s “experience with tainted food” was actually a whole set of experiences at different individual restaurants, with different causes and different mechanisms of action, and in many cases the root cause remains unknown. The CDC, for example, never did figure out the source of the E. coli in the fall 2015 outbreak in the chain’s restaurants in the Pacific Northwest , but it seems to have been utterly unrelated to the norovirus outbreak in the chain’s restaurant in Boston that same fall, and may not have related to the E. coli outbreak a few months later in the chain’s restaurants in Kansas and Oklahoma. The chain just caught some bad breaks and had some very bad publicity because of it–if they had not had the October cases in Oregon, the Kansas cases in December would not likely have made anything close to the same difference in their reputation and finances.
A whole bunch of individual Chipotle employees and managers made a whole bunch of individual gambles, and they lost some gambles to great publicity. They won a bunch more, though, that you’ll never hear about, and all of their competitors won their own gambles, simply because most of the time, you can get away with being a little sloppy and a little careless with the food. If losing $11 billion isn’t really a likely consequence of being a little sloppy, then it’s not a great motivator.
This post by you, and the inability to follow an analogy, serves as a good synopsis of why Libertarians just don’t get it.
You might at least read the posts you quote.
We all live on the planet Earth. Is it a corollary of Libertarian thought that if we don’t like Earth we should move to Mars?
I don’t think we need another gun control debate, but it is interesting that your solution to gunfire is more gunfire! Others of us might think guns, especially in ceretain hands, are a problem, not a solution!
In my experience, talented technicians (and engineers) are often prone to be attracted to the simple solutions of libertarianism and other right-wing fantasies, while true scientists are not.
It might be interesting to explore why this is. Certainly many technicians are ingenious problem solvers; present a top technician and top scientist with a complex broken machine and the technician will probably fix it first. Perhaps their success at applying simple rules breeds overconfidence and impairs their ability to see a bigger picture.
Negative externalities are nearly always caused by failures to recognize property rights. Firstly, waterways should be privately owned. If the government did a better job in recognizing property rights, the harmed property owners could bring suit.
I also am baffled by the assumption that the government official “most assuredly does not have” the public interest at heart. That sounds dogmatic at best, like a critical axiom propping up the libertarian philosophy: governments cannot ever ever ever ever do anything better, more efficiently, or more effectively than the private sector.
Funny, I’d’ve thought the opposite: a working engineer or tech would be well aware that there is never a moment of “I fixed it forever” - that a complex process needs constant maintenance and monitoring or it will spin out of control sooner or later and end up costing far more than the regular maintenance would have. I’ve taught technicians and though the “Planned Maintenance” module is easily one of the most boring parts of the Electromechanics program, I always tried to emphasize that small regular investments of time and energy will save massive hassles down the road.
In a way, it’s vaguely self-defeating, in the sense that if you were a tech who was doing his or her job perfectly, you be in constant but relaxed motion - drifting from system to system, doing tiny bits of maintenance work here and there - and no major problems would ever develop. After a while, though, some budget-cutting clown from the front office (possibly the CEO’s nephew) whose never gotten his hands dirty with icky actual work is going start asking what the tech actually does around here, since there are never any major problems. He’ll fire the tech or cut the tech’s hours, save the company a few bucks and get congratulated for it. Then blammo, a whole assembly line is down for a week because a drive motor seized up, and nephew-clown starts looking for people to blame…
Anyway, I look forward to the next American banking crisis. Meantime our well-regulated Canadian banks will chug steadily onward.
Okay, assuming that isn’t crazy, how about air pollution? Can you “own” the sky? Can I carve out my own piece of atmosphere and sue you if your industry mucks it up?
Stop right there, pardner. There’s no such thing as “your city” or for that matter “a” city. There just the land you personally own, or the land someone else owns that you’ve contracted to lease or rent. Only misguided parasitic leeching statists believe in collective labels for whole areas like “city” or “town” or, heh, “state”.
If you set the expiry date at two weeks when it should be at three weeks you are then throwing away alot of food that is still good. In a world with millions of malnourished people, does throwing away perfectly edible food seem like a good idea?
Yes. For example airlines, or groups of airlines homestead air traffic routes. The question of what height above a parcel of land is owned by the landowner is already a matter that is discussed in courts.
The discussion moving from bank regulation to restaurant inspection isn’t so strange. It allows it to become a pure debate between libertarian purists and their opposites. Because the desired goal and means are pretty simple: clean preparation environment and untainted ingredients: diners don’t get sick. So does govt insure that with inspection or somebody else or some other process somehow ensure it.
The big difference with bank regulation is the huge uncertainty what the goal or means would be. Bank regulation might become a partisan issue in the US (which it wasn’t so much relative to other issues given that Glass Steagall repeal was under Clinton and Dodd-Frank wasn’t a knock down drag out partisan fight to begin with) . Then everyone will have their simple talking points pretending it’s a simple issue. But it just isn’t. Even relatively knowledgeable regular voters as you’d encounter here (not to mention average ones) don’t understand it by and large.
There is a real trade off in heavier regulation or higher capital requirements for banks v growth. Also as in any industry, a trade off between regulation and higher barriers to entry, so reducing competition. Big US banks aren’t actually that opposed to Dodd Frank overall. Guess why. There is a real question whether detailed regulation, or simply the higher capital requirements, is the more efficient way to go in bank regulation. There is a real process of trial and error where some regulatory approaches turn out to be onerous form over substance exercises which accomplish little, but legislators and regulation drafters can’t always predict that.
All in the context of a 2008 meltdown which itself had a lot of different causes, inside and outside the banking system, inside and outside the US. And the next crisis is extremely unlikely to be very similar, though there will be one, coming from somewhere in the system and somewhere on the globe, eventually (if it’s fairly soon, then much more likely related to China or the Italian banking system or general unraveling of the Euro, not the US housing market, but maybe something else completely a little further down the road). And those different possibilities have much more relevance to the right answer in terms of regulation than failing to eliminate different types of bacteria in the food at a restaurant.
Actually, the SEC budget was remarkably static in the four years immediately preceding the 2008 crash, after doubling during the first four years of the Bush administration.
Ha. That’s the problem with hyper-libertarianism, there just is no practicality to it. OK, suppose all waterways are privately owned. Who owns the Mississippi? New York harbor? Could they veto any travel on or over their water? Suppose the guy who owns the Mississippi wants to be a dick. No travel across the US? This fanaticism about property rights separates libertarianism from reality. Though I do give you some credit for not using the word “coercion”.
It may be rude on my part to point this out, but you answered the trivial half of his question (“can someone ‘own’ part of the sky?”) while missing the relevant half (“what recourse exists against people who pollute ‘your’ sky?”)
Maybe as easily, but much more illegally. Which means not as cheaply, if nothing else. If I’m going to risk going to jail, and a govt agent is going to risk going to jail then the bribe is gonna need to be substantial.
For your independent inspector, I could throw him a 20 spot to not look too closely at my meat cooler.
When eating overseas (in third world countries), you either eat at established chain restaurants with their HQ’s in first world nations, if you can find one, they will be mostly safe, as they at least have policies and some level of procedure that stems from areas that are regulated, or, you follow the advice of many many travel advisers. “Don’t drink anything not bottled or boiled. Don’t eat anything you didn’t watch prepared.”
There are guides you can buy that theoretically tell you what places are safe to eat at, but if the guide is wrong, do you get to sue them?
That is the general advice for eating in countries without strong health regulations on their food supply. You want that to be the advice here too?
All die? Probably not. Many will get sick, a pretty good number will die (mostly children and the elderly, along with other immunocompromised people.)
Do we need to all die in order for you to think of it as a problem?
To relate this extended analogy back to bankers, we won’t all be out of a job and homeless either. But many will be out of a job, and a pretty good number will be out of their house, if the banks are allowed to put short term profit ahead of long term economic stability. It is the job of the govt and it’s regulations to look out for that long term stability, which is oft times at odds with the individual banks desire for quick profit.
Others have linked to better refutations of your argument that ebay is unregulated, just wanted to ask, did you actually not know that?
I mean, when you were typing your thesis on why we do not need regulations, and you decided to include ebay as an example, was that because you were not aware of the fact that ebay does in fact have regulations “out the wazoo”, or were you aware of the regulations, but just do not consider them to be excessive?
No, I wonder if I just made a mistake I will be paying for tomorrow morning, and hoping that it will only be tomorrow morning that I pay for it. There’s a good chance that I’ll be fine. I’ve got a pretty good immune system, so even if it is pretty contaminated, I will most likely not have much more than a few hours or a day at most of illness.
It’s almost as if you have never heard of someone dying from contaminated food.
Religion is believing without evidence, and even in the face of evidence. Believing that strong govt protects the food supply is empirically provable, unlike any of your claims.
There are others better trained and equipped to make such determinations. I am a relatively smart guy, but I have my limits.
As little as you seem to understand as to what goes into keeping our food supply safe, you also think that you are qualified to make decisions about medical care as well?
Are you really going to research your doctor, your hospital, and all medical procedures that they recommend?
And when I say research, I do not mean, look up on line, I mean independent studies with access to all of their previous patient’s medical history and records. And you need to do this study while you are debating which EMTs to call and what hospital they should take you to, while you are bleeding out after a car accident.
Now, compared to food supply, medical issues are exponentially more complicated. We’ve already determined that food supply issues are beyond the reach of the average person to full understand. And you want to add medical decisions to that mix?
Now, compared to medical issues, financial issues are up arrow notation more complicated. And in those cases, you don’t even get any level of control over where you get to shop. In the food analogy, you may have researched one particular restaurant, but when you go in, you find that your order is being taken and prepared by a third party, not the company and restaurant that you so thoughtfully researched.
Banking also has externalities. I don’t know if you noticed the recession a little back. But that was not caused by, nor preventable by, you making a choice as to what bank to go with. That was caused by factors well beyond your control, even if you were able to fully grasp them. So, in a situation where others are able to affect your life, with you not having any control over it whatsoever, are you still thinking that individual choice is the best way to regulate such a market?