I'm not saying that we don't need any regulations at all, but I think we should strive to keep it to absolutely bare minimum.
Many politicians are not about helping people, many are about helping themselves. Also, sometimes you can harm people with the intention of helping them
The entire concept of "more or less regulation" is partisan ideology. Every regulation has a cost and a benefit. Good regulations have benefits in excess of their costs.
The problem is that calculating the cost is very difficult. You may have a regulation that increases costs by $10 and produces a $12 benefit. But if the $10 cost increase drives a competitor out of business and allows the remaining provider to raise prices by $20 in total, you're now paying $20 for a $12 benefit.
They also have opportunity costs. You may have a regulation that consumes $20 of a $30 surplus but produces $50 in diffuse positive externalities, which sounds like a good idea. But if there is an alternative that also consumes $20 of the same $30 surplus and produces $500 in positive externalities, you can't have both ($40 > $30) and enacting the first one is really destroying $450 in benefits relative to the second. Trying to enact both is even worse, because then you get neither one and even destroy any benefits inherent in the original transaction.
It's so easy to screw this up that it's better to err on the side of not regulating something than to convince yourself you gained $30 when you really destroyed $1000.
The regulations you want are the ones that have unambiguous, huge net benefits, like prohibiting people from dumping toxic waste in the river, because the cost is low and the benefit is enormous. But even then you have to be careful, because if you're spending $50,000 to prevent $50,000,000 in harm, you could still be wasting $40,000 because there is a way to do it for $10,000.
And the incentives are wrong for people to carefully evaluate things like this, because the people paying the cost aren't the people creating the rules.
Which means "all regulation is bad" is false but "any given regulation is bad" is a solid heuristic.
Yes, but even if you create a regulation that is $40k more expensive to implement than the cheapest option, it still results in a $49.95M in savings (regardless of who would be picking up the bill, at least when you consider us as a society that depends on each other to function) compared to having not set up that regulation at all. The government spending e.g. 1M on experts hired to check whether, say, oil pipelines are built to spec and standards, and not break unexpectedly - is much better for everyone involved overall, than the company operating the pipeline paying hundreds of millions for the cleanup of the resulting environmental damage. Same goes for pretty much any and every other industry that we actually depend on. Yes, sure, be careful if possible - but personally, I’d rather see inefficient spending on necessary regulation than no regulation at all. Because then we’d definitely be picking up the bill for it, maybe not always directly with our wallets or government budgets, but we lose either way.
I do agree with the rest of your points.
Which is why those kinds of regulations are the ones you want.
But it's still worth carefully revisiting them from time to time, because $40,000/company/year is still literally having each company hire a person to waste their entire working life. This is what regulators should optimally be spending most of their time on -- evaluating the existing regulations for ways to reduce the costs without losing the benefit.
That's ridiculous. The Free Market is one of the greatest economic tools we've ever discovered, and hybrid distributed representative/micro constitutional monarchies a successful governance/innovation model. Together they're the foundation for most of modern business and are a direct creation of regulation and maintained by the same. The Free Market has requirements for operation like any tool. I really have trouble understanding how you could argue that business would be better off under mercantilism and aristocracy or any other older, less efficient system. They don't work as well in known theory and haven't worked as well in practice either.
Good vs bad governance is very important, but "more" vs "less" not so much. Just like anything else implementation matters the most.
And I'm saying you're wrong since the Free Market and our current governance models and public buy-in and wealth distributions have led the greatest business success and innovation in the entirety of human history. Good intervention from government has been fantastic for business.
Maybe we just don't need more stuff.
Edit: Carlin quote
Ever notice how your shit is stuff and other peoples stuff is shit?
...and one we've rarely employed. Most markets are absolutely not free in the libertarian sense, and while often for near-sighted politics—such as tariffs for goods—also sometimes for the greater good. For example, antitrust legislation is market regulation as truly free markets tend to converge in a winner-takes-all fashion. And once there are only a handful of large corporations left they tend to start shunning down the market from entry-level companies to help cementing their own position, via make-do regulation of their own and/or lobbying for more robust government-appointed regulation.
1.) Pretty much any regulation harms business.
2.) Also, consumer pays for any regulation costs anyway,
If consumers pay for the regulation, then the business is not harmed. But think about how silly that would sound if you said that to a business person: "Don't worry about government regulations, because your customers will pay for them!"
This is an old fallacy:
"consumer pays for any regulation costs anyway"
Consumers don't pay for regulations except in those situations where demand for a product/service outstrips supply, and therefore the businesses are able to pass the cost along to the consumers. But wherever supply outstrips demand, then the businesses pay for the regulation themselves, via reduced profits and therefore reduced market value.
This is simple supply and demand. It is remarkable that so many people are often mislead on this subject.
This doesn't make sense. Demand may outstrip supply at a certain price, but that just means that the price must go up.
If a market is clearing, then the regulation (or a tax) will be borne by buyers or sellers in proportion to the relationship between the supply and demand elasticities.
I don't see where all regulations were labeled. What's counterproductive is to ignore an obvious trend. And despite the differing motives of the recent tech legislation, their effects are similar and can be summarized by these effects as a whole. I'm not sure where this trend of looking at what laws are "designed" for vs what they actually do came from, but I hope pragmatism returns one day. In the interim, I wish legislators would just sit on their hands.
Things like the new roaming rules are essentially universally followed. It used to be extremely cumbersome to get mobile data when travelling, today it is essentially a non-issue. SEPA payments is another similar thing.
Other regulation isn't for users at all, but for other businesses. Most users won't directly notice the revised payment directive, but they will very likely get a lot of new service.
That's the problem. When enforcement is rare but with complex rules and huge penalties, it causes everyone to have to hire an army of lawyers to make sure it isn't them who the government is able to arbitrarily make an example of. The less common the enforcement the harder it is to predict how to stay on the right side of the line.
What you want instead is clear, simple rules with proportionate penalties that are rigorously enforced -- ideally with notice to give the company a chance to correct its behavior before any penalties have to be put on the table.
The thing that hurts investment the most is surprise. The investors are already taking the risk that the new business may fail. Add an uncertain regulatory environment on top of that and investment will walk away in droves.
This is Europe we're talking about. You are using your liberal American mind set to create issues that don't exist here.
> What you want instead is clear, simple rules with proportionate penalties that are rigorously enforced -- ideally with notice to give the company a chance to correct its behavior before any penalties have to be put on the table.
This is exactly how rules is enforced in Europe. Pedagogy first and after that the stick for those who are purposely break the rules or are malicious.
"This is Europe" doesn't mean anything. Do companies in Europe just violate all the laws constantly and hope the government leaves them alone? Why even have laws then instead of just a king that decides what they don't like after the fact?
If you pass a law that is complicated and hard to understand, complying with it will be arduous and inefficient. "But we didn't mean it that way" doesn't save you from businesses and investment moving elsewhere over compliance costs.
> This is exactly how rules is enforced in Europe. Pedagogy first and after that the stick for those who are purposely break the rules or are malicious.
The EU didn't ask Google to change its practices first. The opening volley was billions of dollars in fines, and then billions more for other things that they also didn't advise them to stop doing (and give them a chance to challenge the interpretation) before imposing huge penalties.
When you have broad, ambiguous laws with arbitrary enforcement, how do you expect anyone to comply with them? Or even know what compliance looks like?
There is also quite a bit of vested interrest protectionism and permission culture run amok there like the link tax to subsidise utterly stupid greedy losers who were complaining about free advertising and wanting more that failed in Spain and yet they want everywhere and right to the memory hole - a more accurate description of right to be forgotten. Then there is the utterly stupid reason one abombinable trade bill failed, not the horrible corporate sovereignty portion that would allow for tobacco companies to sue for antismoking campaigns but thinking they could push the new world into accepting their region naming restrictions when they have been making parmesan cheese for centuries already.
You're completely right. Antitrust and consumer laws are very different from those expressly designed to hurt consumers. However, it could be worth remembering that a law's intentions and a law's effects can be different.
If you delete your FB account and they remove you from the public but still use your data privately, for the average Joe, does it really matter? Also does Joe care?
I think Joe doesn't care, and the negatives will outweigh the positives.
Tech (FAANG) probably should have some regulation, but I am really concerned with the tech people (HN) being so acceptive of regulations that are obviously bad.
I'd say defending terrible regulation is not better either.
Antitrust laws and consumer protections are very different from something like this designed to maximize profits for record labels and publishing companies in character and effect on the world at large. Some regulations are essential to a functional society, while others, like this, are disastrous and serve only to reinforce monopolistic strangleholds.