Yes. They've helped us find that: no, once we have a reputation economy, we don't need the government to tell us who we can safely get in a car with.

And as Yelp, eBay, and other reputation sites have shown us, it turns out that reputation economies are useless once everyone rates every transaction/buyer/seller 5 stars.

You've never filtered for the bad reviews? Also, is it possible that you're only seeing the uninteresting storm of 5-stars because the "interesting" merchants don't survive? (I honestly have no idea if this is the case.)

Exactly. Now that we can make informed decision, we can excise the social/financial cost of regulation and its administration, in exchange for accepting the risk (of making our own informed decision).

I'm a progressive liberal fwiw, not a libertarian.

But "reputation economy" means someone gets to be the guinea pig.

I don't know -- that seems naive. This is not a new story.

From the Wikipedia entry on Guilds: As Ogilvie (2004) shows, the guilds negatively affected quality, skills, and innovation. Through what economists now call "rent-seeking" they imposed deadweight losses on the economy. Ogilvie says they generated no demonstrable positive externalities and notes that industry began to flourish only after the guilds faded away. Guilds persisted over the centuries because they redistributed resources to politically powerful merchants. On the other hand, Ogilvie agrees, guilds created "social capital" of shared norms, common information, mutual sanctions, and collective political action. This social capital benefited guild members, even as it hurt outsiders.

The heyday of guilds lasted from around 1200 to 1700...