Maybe instead of trying to write specific regulations for every little thing, we should just equalize this imbalance of damage.

If a seller's misbehavior causes a buyer's death, then consider that as murder. If it's premeditated, execute the people responsible.

OK, I don't really think this would be a good idea, but I do think it's worth at least thinking about how that would look and why we don't do it. Why is it that the alternative to regulation must always be "caveat emptor"? If a company deliberately sells a faulty product that kills a customer, they should be treated just like a common criminal who breaks into someone's house and shoots them. From this perspective, regulations are as much about protecting the sellers as it is about protecting the buyers.

> If a company deliberately sells a faulty product that kills a customer, they should be treated just like a common criminal who breaks into someone's house and shoots them

I think they should, if they knew what the consequence would be.

But the problem is not so much the extreme cases as the borderline cases where it is hard to prove intent, and hard to prove the understood the severety of the consequences.

Should I be allowed to advertise my unhealthy products in ways that implies they're good for you? Do it to a large enough audience, and it'll likely kill, but not directly. We know more than enough about human willpower to know that to drag out "free will" in those contexts is meaningless.

Now consider how long it took us to get to a consensus of the danger of tobacco, and how long it took us to start penalising the tobacco industry for their deceit in fighting regulation, and consider how much higher the stakes would be if it was not about regulating them but about locking up their executives.

When the seller knows that will be the result, that basically is what happens.

The problem is that most accidents are accidents. You can't deter someone from causing something they don't expect to happen.

And if they aren't deterred then they have to pay for the damages, but it's easy to cause more damage than you have money to pay for it. So we end up on a quest to solve that problem without destroying individuals and small businesses (which would be destroyed immediately by e.g. a large bonding requirement).

Do you have an example of someone being executed because they intentionally sold a faulty product?

We have laws against negligence as well. You absolutely can deter people from accidentally getting people killed to some extent, or at least our laws seem to think we can.

Someone guilty of involuntary manslaughter can't pay back the damage they've done, but we still punish them under the theory that this encourages people to take some care when other people's lives might be at risk.

If making sellers responsible for accidental death and injury would destroy individuals and small businesses, this just reinforces my point that regulations protect sellers as much as buyers.

> Do you have an example of someone being executed because they intentionally sold a faulty product?

If a pharmacist decides she really hates Bob and is going to swap his medicine for poison, she goes down for murder. That obviously doesn't happen very often because the penalty for murder is high and serves as a very effective deterrent to intentional killings like that.

> We have laws against negligence as well. You absolutely can deter people from accidentally getting people killed to some extent, or at least our laws seem to think we can.

It's not that you can't deter some of them, it's that you can't deter enough of them, because they aren't doing it on purpose.

> If making sellers responsible for accidental death and injury would destroy individuals and small businesses, this just reinforces my point that regulations protect sellers as much as buyers.

The problem is regulations often do the same thing. Many regulatory compliance costs are fixed -- they cost the same million dollars whether you have a billion customers or just three.

I'm not talking about an individual action like a pharmacist giving a patient poison instead of medicine. I'm talking about a corporate decision to deliberately give customers an unsafe product because it saves money. Consider the Ford Pinto for a concrete example. Or for a case where it isn't even a buyer/seller relationship, any operator of a coal power plant. They'd easily top the list of worst serial killers of all time if we counted it as murder.

> I'm talking about a corporate decision to deliberately give customers an unsafe product because it saves money. Consider the Ford Pinto for a concrete example.

The problem with those decisions is that you can't get out of them. Killing them isn't your will. It's not the same thing.

Suppose you make cars. You know that 5% of your customers will get into a serious accident, and of that 5%, if you add $1000 to the cost of each car, you can save 1% of them. So $1000/car to save one in 2000 people; two million dollars per person. If you don't do it you know that you sell 60 million cars and so 30,000 people will die. Do you do it? What if it costs $10,000/car? $50,000/car?

At some point you have to say no or a car would cost thirty trillion dollars. And if some company decides that a human life is worth 1.5 million dollars but you later decide that it should be worth 2.1 million dollars, is that really the level of mistake that deserves execution?

All you really have to do is let them know ahead of time how much money it will actually cost them in jury awards, and let the victims sue the coal companies. If you set the value right they'll either figure out how to kill fewer people, or shut down operations.

The analytic scenarios like that have never been the problem because if the company is already doing the math and you don't like the outcome then all you have to do is change the numbers. The problem has always been what to do about businesses that kill people without expecting to.

We wouldn't accept that for an individual. If a pharmacist gets a patient killed because they're deliberately putting a poison into their medicine which they estimate will only kill 0.05% of their patients, they're going to prison.

Half the medicine pharmacists administer is poison that does kill some of their patients. Read the side effects -- liver damage, hypertension, death. They know those outcomes are possible and will happen in some percentage of patients.

There is a difference between giving someone poison for no reason, or purely out of malice, vs. doing it because there is some countervailing advantage that justifies the risk. And sometimes the advantage is just that it costs less than an alternative.

People know that an old Ford Mustang isn't as safe as a new Mercedes S-Class, but it's also less expensive.

That only works if the substance in question is approved for medical use. If it's just some random compound that the FDA has never looked at, they're going to prison.

Thus once again illustrating the advantages of regulation for sellers, not just buyers.

> We have laws against negligence as well. You absolutely can deter people from accidentally getting people killed to some extent, or at least our laws seem to think we can.

And yet tobacco-companies still exist.