UL certification requirements are often incorporated by reference into law. Which is one reason why there's not a proliferation of private standards in that space, with the concomitant race to the bottom.
_You_ might not need the nanny state to protect yourself from yourself, but many people do. In fact, pretty much everybody does, at some point in their lives, in some circumstances. (You just don't know when or where.) And because their loses are invariably externalized one way or another, society has an interest in providing minimum safeguards.
It's like taxes: taxes wouldn't work if everybody got to pick and choose where their taxes went. These solutions are intended to solve collective action problems, which by definition cannot readily and consistently be solved by everybody acting independently.
If anyone wants protection from a nanny, state or otherwise, they can pay for it. Offer all the certifications at the state level you want, just don't interfere with my ability to do business with anyone I please whether they're certified or not.
>society has an interest in providing minimum safeguards.
Requiring you to work at below market rates for YEARS is not in the best interest of society. Harming the poor or immigrant workers by not allowing them to earn a decent living is not in the interest of society. All of these things are in the best interest of the incumbent wealth, not "society."
If you want some protection, then you can easily pay for it. Hire a contractor through Home Depot, Sears, or some other trusted industry name where you'll get lots of contractual protections and the benefit that a multi-billion dollar corporation wants to keep a good reputation if it wants people to keep doing business with it. This works much BETTER than taxes because everybody DOES get to pick and choose where their money goes.
>These solutions are intended to solve collective action problems, which by definition cannot readily and consistently be solved by everybody acting independently.
These solutions are intended to maintain incumbent wealth which harms the poor. You keep trying to sell me on you protecting me, which you obviously know I don't value, without addressing the fact that your ideology keeps the poor in their place. There's two wealthy groups you're protecting here. First, as the property owner, I'm almost certainly more wealthy than the laborer. And secondly, you're protecting the wealthy incumbent workers who don't want lower skilled workers undercutting them.
> Requiring you to work at below market rates for YEARS is not in the best interest of society.
But you are still in training. It's intended as something to do after middle school. Why should unskilled kids earn a full salary? They probably end up costing the company money during that time...
And also that's exactly where you need the regulation from the state! So it can ensure that you are actually properly training those people and not just using them as "human robots" to just do boring / unskilled manual labor.
You're still requiring a poor person to get the permission of a wealthy person to perform work they know how to do on the open market. Why would you cripple the poor in such a way?
How I'm I requering something from workers? A company can hire whoever they want. Where do you see that limited, by offering a special training for highschool kids?
_You_ might not need the nanny state to protect yourself from yourself, but many people do. In fact, pretty much everybody does, at some point in their lives, in some circumstances. (You just don't know when or where.) And because their loses are invariably externalized one way or another, society has an interest in providing minimum safeguards.
It's like taxes: taxes wouldn't work if everybody got to pick and choose where their taxes went. These solutions are intended to solve collective action problems, which by definition cannot readily and consistently be solved by everybody acting independently.