seawasp | Why Government Regulation of All That Stuff?

Adding a cut...

One of the constant grumbles of the Libertarian/Republican crowd is that government adds inefficiency and roadblocks in the way of various business activities, and there is no arguing that one can find all sorts of examples of stupidly inefficient or stupidly-applied laws that seems to support their position. It's in fact inevitable in a large enough organization that it'll have both rules that are not as flexible as one might hope, and enforcers of rules for whom "flexible" is tantamount to heresy.

But.

The problem -- as I touched on in my prior discussion of why "free market competition" ain't happening -- is multifaceted, and starts with the fact that we're basically social animals with a tribal-level inherent understanding... in the middle of a gigantic civilization of hundreds of millions of people who are each part of their own little tribe that is part of a larger general region that has its own local identity, etc.,

If you're in a small group, it has inherent social checks and balances in place. This, too, can be very functional or dysfunctional, as we know from families, but it's inherently understandable. When Uncle Joe starts digging a hole near the fence, we usually already KNOW why he's doing that, and a simple question would let us know if there's any problem associated with it or his choices to do so. He can also be immediately stopped if it turns out Joe's taken too much of the bad grain and is tripping balls, and everyone will know why all this happened.

The larger the group and the more complex the organization, the less our inherent understanding of what's happening, and what's the proper response, can be relied upon. This is especially true when the organization (a country) extends across a wider and wider gap of social backgrounds, resources, knowledge, temperaments, and other organizations.

Add to this the increasingly detached state of a given company or small group of people when compared to their connection with the many other people that will ultimately be affected by their actions, and what we've discussed earlier about how companies are primarily responsible, not to the customers, but to the company and its stockholders, and THEN add to that the all-too-human competitive drive (Western Civilization human, at least -- there's some much less competitive groups out there), and what you get is a perfectly natural mechanism for trying to "get away with anything you can".

Anyone familiar with the labor movement knows that before unions became a force, working conditions were abysmal in most factories. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire demonstrated that the safety of workers was viewed as secondary to the profits to be obtained by them working a few more minutes. Companies fought tooth and nail to prevent any gains of rights or safety from their workers -- as would be expected, given that companies aren't operating for their customers but for the company itself. "Fought" is not an exaggeration; a lot of people in the labor movement died in that struggle.

This wasn't the actual beginning of safety and quality regulation, of course. You can go back in history a few thousand years at least and see how the same basic problems keep cropping up. Laws were made to keep people from shaving little bits off of coins to keep the silver or gold for themselves (this is why many coins ended up with those little ridges around the edge) . Laws were made to require scales to meet certain standards, so that someone couldn't easily short customers. Companies used to cut their food products, whenever possible, with cheap fillers -- ultimately requiring food standards that prevented a company from selling bread that was 20% sawdust or worse.

As we learned more about health and nutrition and hygiene and how that all was interrelated, we realized that other practices were injuring or killing people -- and there was extraordinary resistance to changing those practices. "Childbed Fever" was a major killer of women until -- after a lot of resistance -- we began requiring sterile hygenic procedures to be followed when working on birthing mothers (and later in any form of medical operation). The germ theory of disease revealed how illnesses were spread, and we then made regulations to keep food safer.

And all these regulations were fought. When they were finally instated and became the norm, safety of these things became accepted. The same thing happened with vaccines.

There is a phrase commonly repeated throughout the safety industry:

"Your regulations are written in blood."

You can expand this to be "almost every regulation the government has exists because someone WASN'T as careful as they should have been, someone DID choose to endanger other people, and in short there's a lot of stupid, careless, and occasionally malicious people out there and the general public needs at least some way to call them to account -- because they DO hurt people."

But as individuals, we don't SEE all the people protected by a regulation when we run into its borders. What we see is an obstacle, and often one that makes no sense in a small, individual context. Does it really matter if I dump my old oil into a hole in my yard, or throw a cigarette but out my window, or burn some brush in a pit in my backyard? In general... no, in those singular cases, not really.

But if a hundred million people do it, it DOES matter. If a company does it, with the vast volume of waste it can generate, it does indeed matter. And every time you make a rule that has more complicated exceptions, the more resources it costs not just to enforce, but to determine IF it should be enforced. (this is why it is sometimes cheaper to just give a benefit to everyone rather than trying to target only the most deserving, because the cost of doing the targeting is often quite high).

The nature of corporations exacerbates this problem, because technically the company does not -- cannot -- care about the health of people downstream who aren't stockholders. It has to care about its profit margins, and if you have to install safety equipment and do safety briefings and pay insurance and so on and so forth, that's eating into your profits.

So companies have a built-in DESIGN REQUIREMENT to try to wiggle out of any regulations that keep them from operating. They are quite literally motivated to cheat, to lie, and to even kill by proxy. As someone else phrased it, "they would absolutely sell you razor blade cereal if it would improve their margin." And they'd do a lot of advertising blitzes to convince you this was a good idea.

This is why we NEED government inspection of food -- meat processors, grain, vegetables, all of it. A company will try to find a way to sell even the stuff that won't pass an inspection. They'll cut down on the number of times the grinders are properly washed and disinfected, because that takes time and money. Passing the inspection requirements down to a state or local level puts them in the hands of people more easily pressured or bribed into looking the other way. And it's well-established that many companies did, are, and will continue to do this.

It's why we need government regulation of banking and finance -- because various forms of high-finance cheating lead to catastrophic consequences for everyone later, often even those who were doing the cheating -- but worse for those below them.

It's why we have traffic laws and regulations, for land, air, and sea, because people will make a short-term decision that leads to terrible problems later if they don't have a set of explicit rules telling them NOT to. Not necessarily even because they're malicious, but because they can't see far enough into the future to realize the consequences of their actions.

This is also expressed IN a lot of the de-regulation attempts; we become complacent once things are going well. The basic safety of our food industry became an accepted FACT -- rather than it being understood as a constant and complex PROCESS -- and that allowed for a mindset of "see, our food is safe, we hardly ever see (problem X) any more, so we don't need to keep inspecting so hard for (problem X)" . This chain of thought ignores the fact that it IS the constant inspection and enforcement of rules dealing with Problem X that have led to X being so rare now.

Inspection of pork has made US commercial pork so free of trichinosis and other possible diseases that it is no longer recommended you cook it until it's all gray-brown inside. But stop or reduce the inspections, and you'll start hearing about it coming back. Not INSTANTLY, but in a few years, when the relaxation trickles down the chain. Required vaccinations made many endemic diseases into rarities, like pertussis (whooping cough), measles, mumps, etc. One bad study and a lot of ill-considered publicity led to pressure to remove, weaken, or reduce vaccination requirements... and we're now seeing these almost forgotten diseases making comebacks.

I could go on and on, but what it boils down to is simple: people, and even more so companies, are shortsighted and not motivated to ensure the best for everyone -- especially those they don't know. Because of this, you need guardrails. And that's what government regulations are.