Hmm. Libertarians are alright. Their desire to embrace deregulation concerns me though.
The fundamental flaw of Libertarian thought is the disregard of the tragedy of the commons. The idea that rational actors could deplete a common resource through nothing but the logical pursuit of their own self-interest is a big hole in their platform, as far as I'm concerned.
That's about one of the best nutshell arguments against the philosophy. I think another is risk, where the bigger the businesses or organizations are, the more potential they have to cause harm (intentionally or no) and to a much greater degree. The bank collapse late last decade is a good example.
The one is contained within the other; you're right in that risk scales but libertarianism is basically a mercantilist approach to feudalism anyway. That was one of Piketty's biggest conclusions: without economic protectionism, you will end up with a feudal economy.
Well, Libertarians don't always seem to agree with each other on certain issues it seems, but the ones I've talked to tend to be fairly socially liberal. They tend to be pro-gun, pro gay rights, pro-privacy, etc. Basically, if you're not doing anything to hurt anyone, the government shouldn't really have a say in what you do. But where the argument falls apart for me is when the same mentality is taken to businesses and regulation. I do believe that proper regulation very much protects us as consumers and citizens, whether we're talking EPA, OSHA, lending laws, etc. I really feel that the majority of businesses out there don't give two shits about the public good unless there are real deterrents in place to make them think twice about screwing people over. Saying that the free market will set everything straight in the long run strikes me as pretty naive.
Do you have evidence for your belief that "proper regulation very much protects us"? I don't know much about the agencies you mentioned, but I think the effectiveness of OSHA is at least questionable. I have been looking into the FDA and have some doubts about how beneficial it is.
Are you going to make an argument? Or sit back and cast aspersions? Because I've noticed you like to go "see that organization that conservatives have been defunding and castrating for decades? Look, they made a mistake, therefore THEY ARE COMPLETELY WORTHLESS" and it's bullshit. You're better than that, rd95 is better than that, we're all better than that. I think you've never interfaced with OSHA. I think you don't understand that workplace safety isn't about how many people are dying it's about safety and health. OSHA, for example, regulated asbestos. They regulated welding. They regulated noise. Because while everybody knew all this shit was dangerous, OSHA regs for noise exposure (for example), predated civil noise code by 15 years. And see, my great uncle welded non-OSHA. He was blind by 50. I welded OSHA. I see fine. More than that, I have a functional respiratory system. And I've worked on non-OSHA sets, and I've worked on OSHA sets, and on a non-OSHA set one of my coworkers tore his fucking patella off. Up'n'down, mutherfucker. A half dozen times a day. You can't see it from the photo, but it's 18" up, and then another 18" to the deck, and it's covered in frost, and that frost never melts, and I did it for five weeks, and he did it for one, because he spent the other four in bed rest. Not getting paid. That's a picnic table. You're above it. It's night. It's 10 below. It's covered in frost and ice and it's 18" wide and it's unlit. And your job is to walk it a dozen times a day. That truck? You need a CDL to drive it, by the way, but since we were on private property you don't, but then someone complained to OSHA, and the producers sat behind the poor kid they interviewed for two fucking hours to intimidate him into giving the right answers because you know what? The law exists such that OSHA complaints are handled that way. Because OSHA is a failure, right? Throw it all out. Because while the fatalities are going down, they were obviously going down before so the whole artifice is a sham, right? It's like the FDA. I mean, it's not like thalidomide was a big deal. The fact that it was never approved in the US is a blow against capitalism or some shit. And yeah. Vioxx. But between thalidomide and Vioxx were people such as - well, we've been here before. See, I work in the world. Where dangerous shit happens. And I know how helpful it is to be able to say "sorry, man, I'd love to climb that 3-story scaffold without a safety harness to hang a microphone but, you know, it's against my union regs." Because I can say that - SOMETIMES - and sometimes I can't and for you to sit there and pretend there's no difference? I mean, really. I'm being polite. It's difficult. There are times where it is clear you are speaking from a position of ideology, rather than experience or knowledge, and those times are unattractive. I've fallen off a 10' ladder. I didn't enjoy it. And I've been given tasks that, when handled poorly, lead to injury. And when it's abundantly clear that OSHA, for example, is a part of the equation, I don't get those tasks anymore. And that's a cause worth fighting for. Worth fighting YOU for.
Thank you for sharing your views, as always vivid and memorable. You are right that I have little experience or knowledge of OSHA and much to learn. I haven't intentionally picked on organizations that were weakened by budget cuts. According to PBS, the OSHA budget appears fairly steady. I have little doubt that irregular funding makes it harder for agencies to be effective. That is a point against the public model, not in favor, as long as there is risk of Congressional mismanagement. This sentence leaves me confused. If you don't agree that the rate of death is a useful measure of safety, we may have such divergent expectations of what a workplace safety agency should do that it hardly matters whether we agree or not.you like to go "see that organization that conservatives have been defunding..."
workplace safety isn't about how many people are dying it's about safety and health
The rate of injury matters far more than the rate of fatality and the rate of chronic health problems matters more than that. A "dangerous" job is one where you're likely to get hurt. A job that is likely to kill you is a self-limiting problem. Pretty soon nobody does it. A job that might kill you is one that likely won't be changed because the problems rarely reveal themselves. However, I personally have designed sound systems for boutique clothing chains that will produce a PEL of 80dB because an 8-hour exposure of 85 or more is a violation of OSHA. It's the flip side of designing industrial environments such that workers can walk around and do their jobs all day without having to wear hearing protection. Now explain to me how this is going to get better by handing it to the private sector. I can't wait.
You'll have to find someone else to make the argument for this claim, because it's not mine. I am not sure it's true, nor its negation. I don't know, and I would rather share the ideas I have on the subject with people who don't already seem to have all the answers. Yesterday you said you are ready for a fight. I'm not interested in a fight. I often have difficulty comprehending your language. And when I write "the effectiveness of OSHA is at least questionable" you read "THEY ARE COMPLETELY WORTHLESS." I enjoy many of your contributions here, especially the wise and worldly advice you give to people with less experience. Surely we both have better things to do than throw words at each other.Now explain to me how this is going to get better by handing it to the private sector.
Yeah I'm not buying it. You don't say "the effectiveness of OSHA is at least questionable" in response to a discussion about workplace safety, unionization, hourly compensation or anything within the scope of OSHA. You use it as a counterargument to the vast, sweeping and unasserted That's someone stating a belief in government oversight, and you ask "do you have any EVIDENCE" for that "BELIEF." Then you throw out that canard about OSHA, as if a four-page study somehow invalidates any "belief" in "proper regulation." Maybe you don't know. But you don't use your lack of knowledge as a bridge to exploration. You use it as a "some people are wondering" sideswipe to call into question the very idea of "proper regulation." Yes, we have better things to do than throw words at each other. But surely you have better things to do than make ideologically disingenuous arguments about libertarianism. I'll have that discussion with you - and I invite you to have that discussion with anyone - but I'm not willing to believe that your bag of dirty tricks comes from a place of naiveté.I do believe that proper regulation very much protects us as consumers and citizens, whether we're talking EPA, OSHA, lending laws, etc. I really feel that the majority of businesses out there don't give two shits about the public good unless there are real deterrents in place to make them think twice about screwing people over. Saying that the free market will set everything straight in the long run strikes me as pretty naive.
TIL: Talk about heroes in public service. Vioxx gets a bit more of a pass because the company withheld data from its studies, which points to the need for more regulation of clinical trials, not less.I mean, it's not like thalidomide was a big deal. The fact that it was never approved in the US is a blow against capitalism or some shit.
In the United States, pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey M.D. withstood pressure from the Richardson-Merrell company and refused Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to market thalidomide, saying further studies were needed.[81] This reduced the impact of thalidomide in United States patients. Although thalidomide was never approved for sale in the United States at the time, millions of tablets had been distributed to physicians during a clinical testing program. It was impossible to know how many pregnant women had been given the drug to help alleviate morning sickness or as a sedative.[96]
Kelsey was a badass. My point, if I have one other than vitriolic bile, is that between Kelsey's FDA and the FDA that let Vioxx through were generations of legislators and lobbyists reducing their scope and fettering their investigations. I'm willing to bet you interface with the FDA a hell of a lot more than I ever have, but the FDA I knew was an organization of timid bureaucrats.
It strikes me that monied persons and their numerous spokespersons (lobbyists, captured regulators, corrupt public officials, etc.) act like a torrent of rain on any dike of regulation. The public interest is eroded away constantly, a process rendered near-certain simply because of how capital's interests are aligned. I know the issue is not served well by simple metaphors, but regulatory capture / deregulation is a tough problem in and of itself. Add to the brew a myopic population--weighed down by poverty and shitty food and systemic racism--and when I see someone (above, not you) argue tacitly for pushing even further the Koch Brothers' agenda, all I'm left with is exasperated metaphors.My point, if I have one other than vitriolic bile, is that between Kelsey's FDA and the FDA that let Vioxx through were generations of legislators and lobbyists reducing their scope and fettering their investigations.
Ok. Youll.have to forgive this response for being limited because a) I'm on my phone at the moment and b) unlike someone like say kleinbl00 or mk, I'm not always good at coming up with super concrete stuff. So my response will be a bit more in abstract comparisons. So about the FDA and all, no system is immune from problems and that's why concepts such as transparency and effective checks and balances are important. You can't just pick one or two examples of an organization not meeting our expectations and say "they're not working right now in this particular instance, so that must mean no regulatory body is worthwhile." That's just not really fair. I can think of two really good, concrete examples where a lack of regulation or ignoring regulations have caused public harm. The housing/financial crisis from the last decade, to the best of my understanding, is due in part to deregulating some of the ways banks could make loans and transfer money. The result was disastrous and I think people can argue that we are still trying to recover. In more recent events, the Flint Michigan water crisis shows what happens when people decide to ignore safety regulations. Many people have been harmed when it could have been avoided. In more abstract concepts though, we can compare regulation heavy countries like America, France, etc. with countries that are less inclined, such as India, Haiti, etc. Just looking at the them on a surface level from their roads to buildings to public safety you can see how regulations can have a big impact. For a good example, if you were to compare The Mississippi River and The Ganges River, you'd see the effect environmental regulations have. These things do male a difference. Laws that are meant to protect tenants such as rental laws and building codes give us healthy and safe places to live and ensure they stay that way. Workplace regulations really do ensure that our places of employment are safer and that we're at least somewhat protected when it comes to being treated fairly. On and on I can go. In short though, the protect us from living in places like this and they protect us from work situations like this and they help us protect the world from turning into this.
Thanks for sharing so many ideas! I feel like I am in the same boat, I have a hard time coming up with concrete evidence, because these subjects are so complex. I don't think we have any hope of drawing a conclusion if I try to address all the different subjects you raised. And I completely agree that it's not fair for me to pick out one or two examples and use them to make a broad argument. By the same token, when you disagree that "the free market will set everything straight in the long run" you are arguing against a farfetched idea that I haven't expressed. You mentioned OSHA as an example of proper regulation that protects us. I don't know much about OSHA and haven't interacted with the agency, so the first question that comes into my head is a very simpleminded one: "Is OSHA effective in its mission to assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women?" Do you agree with me that it could be a worthwhile subject to learn about, as long as we are careful not to make broad conclusions about other organizations? To try and answer the first question, I ask another simpleminded question: "Is there evidence that OSHA has a positive effect on workplace safety?" It seems clear to me that, if OSHA is effective, we should be able to see some results. If we don't see such evidence, we shouldn't conclude that OSHA is worthless, but we should entertain some doubt about whether it is a good example of regulation that protects us. (That's why my claim was that "the effectiveness of OSHA is at least questionable," not that "no regulatory body is worthwhile.") In my view, the clearest evidence of effectiveness would be reduced rates of injury and death in the workplace. Injuries are harder to classify and recording is inconsistent, but the records on fatal incidents are more complete. The chart shows that workplace safety, as measured by the rate of fatalities, is indeed improving. But I don't see any difference in the rate of improvement before or after OSHA was created. I don't trust the source of the chart, but I was able to confirm the numbers on another site, which also mentions other contributing factors, both governmental and otherwise. Do you agree that the effectiveness of OSHA is at least questionable, based on this evidence? If I asked you to predict what the chart would show before you saw it, what might you have said? I think you are right, at a high level, businesses care primarily about profit. And on that same high level, as customers we don't give two shits about the profits of businesses. Yet we give businesses the money that contributes their profits every time we interact with them. Why do we keep giving them money, if we don't care about their profits? Obviously we are obligated to give them money if we want to continue the relationship of exchange by which both sides benefit. And the business has to consider the welfare of the customer as well. How long will you continue to buy from ExxonMobil after you learn that they are putting lead in the unleaded? Will you go back to a restaurant after a case of food poisoning? The business interest in the public good is merely instrumental toward making more profit, but it is to some extent effective. Hurting a customer can lead to expensive lawsuits. Bad service can affect ratings, reducing market share. These are natural incentives that are compatible with human nature. The results aren't perfect, but "customer service" is something every successful business has to consider. If you are so cynical (as you should be) to doubt that a business cares about treating you well when the business stands to gain from every interaction, why are you not equally cynical about the motivation for a public safety inspector, who may gain nothing extra by doing the job properly, and in fact might be able to gain by letting someone cheat?I really feel that the majority of businesses out there don't give two shits about the public good
This right here is why we seldom get along in these discussions. Your methodology is flawed. The argument, the debate, the discovery, the process, the whatever-you-want-to-call-it, does not start with "I have selected THIS evidence for discussion. We shall have this debate on these terms." It starts with "here's the subject of debate. Bring all the evidence you can defend." Arguing the suitability of government oversight based on a four-page flyer printed by a bush-league think-tank wholly funded by the Koch brothers (that is utterly and totally without citation, by the way) is argument by invective, not rhetoric. I chose to dismantle you based on what I know of OSHA because it effectively annihilated any standing you may have had from a factual basis but I could just as easily have dismantled you for this. You're using a poisoned source based on zero empirical data and extrapolating it out to such a broad and useless extreme that the only logical explanation is you're attempting argument by slight-of-hand. And you can fool some people. But if your goal is to actually broaden the understanding of the situation by all sides, your efforts are disingenuous. You're a smart guy. You're much more polite than I am. But your style of rhetoric is maddeningly dishonest. I mean, look at this shit: Because our concrete need for their goods and services outweighs our abstract need for ethics and morality, ASSUMING we know what Nestle does to health in sub-Saharan Africa, for example. Your whole argument hinges on consumers having perfect understanding of the inputs, outputs and externalities of manufacture and marketing and I've met people who didn't know olive oil comes from olives. Compare and contrast - Danon is allowed to pretend they invented a new kind of bacteria, put Jamie Lee Curtis in white and suddenly Activia is the hot new thing and war on breastfeeding? what's that? I mean, this is basic Maszlow's Hierarchy shit and I say that fully aware of how discredited Maszlow is because holy shit, son, "I need eggs" is going to be a lot more compelling than "I abhor animal cruelty" even if the cage-free organic ones aren't four times as expensive. Thus, we rely on our government to make sure that the shit we don't think about isn't produced in an unthinkable way. Blows your scope the fuck up - and that's just the point. You like to argue gerrymandered little corners of the world and hope that nobody will consider the greater consequences. Which is fine when we're discussing narrow things... but we're not. We're discussing "is government necessary" and that's a wall you gotta build brick by brick, not by saying "look at this brick, imagine the wall." I honestly don't know where your libertarian philosophies come from. I do know that your arguments have lots of focus and very little perspective. I've been deposed. I've been trained for deposition. I've taken training in medical liability and I've picked a lot of fights on the Internet. What you're doing - what you're trying to do - is win by default, by discrediting the source. Lawyers used to do that to me as an acoustician - they don't understand the first fucking thing about field impact isolation class but if they can convince the jury I'm an idiot because my report has a dangling participle phrase in it, they don't have to. But your goal isn't to sway the jury despite the evidence. Is it? It's to convince others of the truth of your statements. I mean, Right. If I get food poisoning from the Mexican restaurant down the street, I can (A) sue or (B) report them to the health department. Which solution do you think is out of reach to 99% of consumers? Dude. A health inspector that fails independent verification ceases to be a health inspector. A health inspector that gets caught taking bribes goes to jail. Meanwhile, he gets paid regardless of what he finds - unlike the restaurant, which has a concrete financial incentive to play as close to the edge as possible, the inspector has no motivation in play other than remuneration for doing his job. You know this. You're aware of this. You use rationality in nearly every single one of your arguments, but whenever "the government" is involved, you tack towards "but public servants can be assumed to be shady." I want to see the kinds of arguments you're capable of when you aren't hiding behind doublespeak, smoke and mirrors. Make an honest argument. I'll give you an honest answer. But browbeating other people with obsequious backhanded attacks on the obvious is intellectually lazy and rhetorically dishonest. You're better than this.Do you agree that the effectiveness of OSHA is at least questionable, based on this evidence?
Yet we give businesses the money that contributes their profits every time we interact with them. Why do we keep giving them money, if we don't care about their profits?
The business interest in the public good is merely instrumental toward making more profit, but it is to some extent effective. Hurting a customer can lead to expensive lawsuits. Bad service can affect ratings, reducing market share.
If you are so cynical (as you should be) to doubt that a business cares about treating you well when the business stands to gain from every interaction, why are you not equally cynical about the motivation for a public safety inspector, who may gain nothing extra by doing the job properly, and in fact might be able to gain by letting someone cheat?
It's gonna be a few days before I'm in front of my computer to give you my full thoughts, so bear with me cause mobile is just no good for these kinds of conversations. But to keep the conversation going, I will touch on this . . . Theoretically, it's probably something along the lines of risk vs. rewards or something. Companies have much, much more to gain by being deceitful and are more likely to do it if they think they can get away from it. A public official, ideally speaking, runs the risk of losing much more than he has to gain by doing a poor job, or even worse, accepting a bribe. He doesn't stand to make millions by looking the other way, but if looking the other way lands him in jail and burdened by fines, he'll probably think twice. As for customers supporting bad businesses, you underestimate just how easy it is for businesses to take advantage of people. A lot of the time, the consumers are often ignorant on how they're at risk of being taken advantage of. Everything from payday loan companies and buy here pay here dealers (cars, furniture, electronics) to hack dentists and doctors to bad landlords make life difficult for people who don't know any better. Additionally, if a company is the only option available, say a gas company for example, consumers have no choice but to do business with them. Lastly, sometimes customers might not care about how a company is run, but that doesn't mean the company is worth supporting. There are businesses out their that are absolute hell for their employees that customers still patronize. Regulatory agencies like OSHA and The Department of Labor helps protect those workers.If you are so cynical (as you should be) to doubt that a business cares about treating you well when the business stands to gain from every interaction, why are you not equally cynical about the motivation for a public safety inspector, who may gain nothing extra by doing the job properly, and in fact might be able to gain by letting someone cheat?