Re:EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the ...
by AnthonyMouse on Sunday May 27, 2018 @10:14AM
(#17166941)
> But you make that argument like there's a fixed pot of money to go around. $25 to spend on regulation, but tough our ancestors already regulated speed limits and copyright so you can't have any more. Pity about the environment and data privacy but hey.
Nobody is saying the amount is fixed over time, but that doesn't make it inexhaustible. At any given point there is a finite amount of overhead it's possible to absorb before you're doing more harm than good. If you think your new regulations are more justifiable than your ancestors' old regulations, nobody is saying you can't repeal the old ones to leave more surplus for the new ones. But if you overload a ship, it sinks.
> Thing is there's been a fair bit of growth since my childhood, or even since the widespread adoption of the www. Just compare the sheer amount of crap people have compared to a child of even the 90s. Plenty of slack left for some regulation and changes without even the cost of compliance of 20 years ago - there's so much more money in the system.
"Progress creates surplus" is not a rule. It very often moves it from one place to another.
For example, the rise of refrigeration and microwave ovens in workplaces made it more attractive to bring lunch from home. That means less business for restaurants and fewer customers to amortize fixed costs like rent, which reduces the allowable regulatory overhead before the restaurant goes out of business.
> If a business is so marginal that it can't cope with a change in interest rates or a new regulation or tax rate then any number of other tiny events would have sunk it anyway.
"Don't worry about marginal costs, marginal businesses would fail anyway" is how you successfully boil the ocean. You destroy the marginal businesses -- which is obviously bad -- but you also push an entirely different set of businesses toward the margin, so that when the next regulation or interest/tax rate hike comes, they also sink when they would previously have been able to survive.
And the entire issue here is that it's cumulative. We started with a business that had $20 in costs and $100 in value. That is nowhere near marginal. One regulation that increases their costs by $5 is easily survivable. But twenty such regulations bankrupts them. You have to weigh your alternatives, you can't have everything at the same time.
Nobody is saying the amount is fixed over time, but that doesn't make it inexhaustible. At any given point there is a finite amount of overhead it's possible to absorb before you're doing more harm than good. If you think your new regulations are more justifiable than your ancestors' old regulations, nobody is saying you can't repeal the old ones to leave more surplus for the new ones. But if you overload a ship, it sinks.
> Thing is there's been a fair bit of growth since my childhood, or even since the widespread adoption of the www. Just compare the sheer amount of crap people have compared to a child of even the 90s. Plenty of slack left for some regulation and changes without even the cost of compliance of 20 years ago - there's so much more money in the system.
"Progress creates surplus" is not a rule. It very often moves it from one place to another.
For example, the rise of refrigeration and microwave ovens in workplaces made it more attractive to bring lunch from home. That means less business for restaurants and fewer customers to amortize fixed costs like rent, which reduces the allowable regulatory overhead before the restaurant goes out of business.
> If a business is so marginal that it can't cope with a change in interest rates or a new regulation or tax rate then any number of other tiny events would have sunk it anyway.
"Don't worry about marginal costs, marginal businesses would fail anyway" is how you successfully boil the ocean. You destroy the marginal businesses -- which is obviously bad -- but you also push an entirely different set of businesses toward the margin, so that when the next regulation or interest/tax rate hike comes, they also sink when they would previously have been able to survive.
And the entire issue here is that it's cumulative. We started with a business that had $20 in costs and $100 in value. That is nowhere near marginal. One regulation that increases their costs by $5 is easily survivable. But twenty such regulations bankrupts them. You have to weigh your alternatives, you can't have everything at the same time.