But who regulates the regulators? As bad as this example is, have you never heard of the nightmares people fall into dealing with government bureaucracies? If anything, they're much much worse than the worst that companies inflict.
Regulatory capture is a real thing too. Regulation isn't obviously positive just because there are reasons people trot out to justify it.
You're right, companies don't generally care about me. But neither does the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice, my local police department, my local school board, or any post office in which I've ever found myself.
You know how sometimes a corporation buys all of it’s competitors but keeps them in business? And it creates a false facade of competition? What if they bought the government and did the same thing? Well, consider it done. And the joke is on you for as long as you let it.
You, like most Americans tend to do, are failing to understand the democratic concept and the responsibilities it must entail.
A healthy democracy is very possible. It requires 2 basic things:
- An fair and flat electoral process with sufficient protections against financial and propagandistic inequalities.
- An engaged and educated populace, elections produce politicians who serve the electorate.
The second one is a catch-22. An educated populace requires quality education requires a healthy democracy. for that reason, when things go wrong, they are extremely hard to get right again. This is why public education and a focus on humanities has such a deep legacy in the history of building democracies. Without both, short-sighted and/or self-interested thinking like yours will doom the arrangement.
"You're right, companies don't generally care about me. But neither does the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice, my local police department, my local school board, or any post office in which I've ever found myself."
I've found that those agencies tend to care more about me than random companies. The rep at any of those places might not be able to help, but I can usually get them to try.
> But who regulates the regulators? As bad as this example is, have you never heard of the nightmares people fall into dealing with government bureaucracies? If anything, they're much much worse than the worst that companies inflict.
I think that last sentence could only be honestly written by someone who's lived their whole life in a society protected by strong regulatory structures. The massive benefits of regulation are taken for granted and forgotten, but the problems of implementation that still exist are magnified out of proportion.
Government bureaucracy is certainly not perfect, but lets not kid ourselves that it's worse than the alternative.
And the answer to your question is: a functioning legislature that's accountable to its constituents, and competently exercises its oversight role.
> Regulatory capture is a real thing too.
But rather than a call for less regulation, it's really a call for better oversight of the regulators.
My local neighbourhood police goes around visiting "difficult" households, mental patients that can still live at home, elderly in particular situations, addicts, checking up on "problematic" households that have been in contact with the law. I followed their stories about this aspect of their job on Twitter. They usually can't do anything much, in sad situations, but they do keep an eye out. Similarly they helped me out when my apartment burned down. Or when the corner shop got robbed, comforted the customer that had a knife held to his throat, and the owner. So they actually do care.
Certain parts of the social security administration (or equivalent) also care. They want to help people, that's what it's for. It depends on where you end up, if your case fits like a cog in the bureaucracy, that's what you'll get, it's efficient. But it's a social safety net for a reason, what else do the people do, whose jobs it is to guide people around and make sure they arrive at the right part of the bureaucracy, if not care?
There could be even more care, but when I see the homeless in other countries, how many are on the streets for no other reason than mental health, I think we're doing pretty good. I always judge a society by how they treat those who are the worst off. Lifting that very lowest rung, that is the only real progress in a society.
Oh you know another funny thing, your example about post offices? You probably remember those heart-warming stories of a grand-child addressing a drawing to "granpa" and the post office somehow figuring out where it should go (and similar stories). That kinda stopped when the postal service got privatised into multiple competing businesses. The delivery guy that belongs to the now-privatised previously-government postal service still has a pretty good idea who lives in the street, whether I have new neighbours, makes a (very short) chat. The delivery people of other delivery services, that have always been private, do not.
I'm sorry but in my experience everything points that government regulated services and the like inherently allow their clerks to care more than a private business.
I just imagined what it would be like if the local neighbourhood police got privatised. Brrr.
You and people like you talk as though the various regulatory bodies simply issue an edict and every corporation is obligated to oblige that very second, and it's ridiculous.
1. The regulations themselves are often based heavily upon opinions and trusted advice from people who actively are or who formerly were in the industry being regulated, not simply dreamed up and pulled from someone's ass
2. There is an entire months long process of discussion, meeting, decisions, appeals, revisions, etc. engaged in between experts on both sides, lawyers on both sides, etc. By the time a regulation becomes required law, it's likely been attended to by a few hundred if not thousand people from both private enterprise and Government over months if not YEARS of work.
3. Once a regulation becomes law, companies often have months of forewarning to get into compliance. In the event that a business is non-compliant with something, unless it's immediately life threatening, they are given warnings, written warnings, guidance, possible solutions, etc. Regulators are not some comic book villain trying to fuck over mom and pop stores. They are attempting to ensure the safety, efficiency, and long life of everyone involved in a business. They want you to be compliant, not to file paperwork and shut you down.
> As bad as this example is, have you never heard of the nightmares people fall into dealing with government bureaucracies?
Oh I have, and for years and years I took them at face value but ANECDOTE IS NOT EVIDENCE. Almost every time you hear about some person who ended up on the wrong end of a regulator's pen, if you start digging you'll find a long history of shady ass behavior from that person which is conveniently omitted from their account of the events, for I'm sure totally-not-lying reasons.
> Regulation isn't obviously positive just because there are reasons people trot out to justify it.
The vast majority of regulations are written in the blood of the people who had to die to show us that storing some chemical in a break room gave every 3rd employee cancer, or every person who ate fish from a polluted river who didn't know that the chemicals in it would destroy their bodies. The fact that you personally don't understand whatever is behind a given regulation, does not make it unimportant or frivolous.
> But neither does the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice, my local police department, my local school board, or any post office in which I've ever found myself.
Except you can affect those if you get off your dead ass and vote.
Sounds like a great system for the incumbents, and a massive cost to any new players. You give it away when you say "both sides". In fact there are many sides, and regulation all to often favours the one with the best connections to the government - usually the largest.
Yeah, by now. The idea is to reverse that, because if you just say "fuck all regulations" you have pandemonium, which is the same in that it also favors the largest, but is different in that it's a million times worse than even what we have now.
The very same interests that subvert regulations then use that subversion to say regulations, "in general" are bad, without explicitly saying what the alternative would be. No regulations, or less corruption? What, exactly, are you arguing for?
BTW, you've been shadowbanned for 5 months or so. All of your comments start out invisible except to accounts with showdead=true. Those accounts can sometimes "vouch" one of your comments, like I just did here, making them visible to all users.
Regulatory capture is a real thing too. Regulation isn't obviously positive just because there are reasons people trot out to justify it.
You're right, companies don't generally care about me. But neither does the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice, my local police department, my local school board, or any post office in which I've ever found myself.