YSK: Regulations don't exist because governments like them...
YSK: Regulations don't exist because governments like them...
163 comments
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Regulations are written in blood
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But I'm an alpha man child and I need to make people bleed to prove it!
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Don't worry I'm sure we'll find some place that lets you feel the bleeding edge of unregulated capitalism in an alpha release.
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To continue with the argument of "the market will self-regulate and people wouldn't buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again"
Okay but how many people died, how many people are suffering long-term effects, and what's stopping them from adding a different deadly thing to our food?
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wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again
Assuming there is perfect information in the market. In reality there is heavy information asymmetry.
It also assumes free competition while we have every market dominated by a few players buying up everyone else, often with cartel like behavior.
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To continue with the argument of "the market will self-regulate and people wouldn't buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again"
Turns out the parent company owns every other brand of that product, so going to another brand is meaningless
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Market self regulation assumes informed consumers that are smart enough to know what things mean. Also it assumes healthy competition and companies that are competing to make the best product at the chrapest price. It ALSO assumes brand lotalty isn't a thing, and consumers are judging things purely objectively.
Like, i understand the idea, but in practice there are a ton of caveats.
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Market self regulation assumes informed consumers that are smart enough to know what things mean
Not just smart enough, but informed enough. That means every person spending literally hundreds/thousands of hours per week researching every single aspect of every purchase they make. Investigating supply chains, performing chemical analysis on their foods and clothing, etc. It's not even remotely realistic.
So instead, we outsource and consolidate that research and testing, by paying taxes to a central authority who verifies all manufacturers keep things safe so we don't have to worry about accidentally buying Cheerios that are laced with lead. AKA: The government and regulations.
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Also, if you want inspections to make sure there isn't bird shit in the milk, then you need regulation. Otherwise people are just drinking bird shit and they don't know.
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And also they're already basically Monopolies. You don't have real options. Most food products come from like 3 mega corps who own hundreds of brands.
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Also the evidence shows this isn't really true, anyway.
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Bleach, actually. A small amount of bleach added to spoiled milk makes it taste brand new. The government actually suggested this in a few countries for a while.
Plaster in flour was common enough that after the miller, the middle men, and then the baker all added a cut, there were loaves being sold with less than 20% flour in them. The result was mass malnutrition.
Also, and this is a spicy one but backed by basic economics, regulations are a required element to capitalism. The notion that deregulation is pro capitalism is a misinterpretation of the idea that markets are self regulating. A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations. All our current economic woes are the result of straying away from proven economic theory (mostly deregulation) to the right allowing the corruption of the marketplace and emergence of a strong oligarchy.
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A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations.
We've had numerous laws precisely because companies couldn't play fair, and made things worse for all involved. The government didn't pass laws against company towns, scrip, and predatory pricing because they decided to ban things for fun.
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That second paragraph is a pretty concise explanation on why ancaps and their ideas are stupid.
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A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations.
And the truth is that the oligarchs, the established players in the game of capitalism, do not want a free market. They want a market with the illusion of freedom. A free market like the one you describe is, in fact, a true free market. Because then they have to actually compete with new players. Players who don't come from the same backgrounds as the established players. Who may have different beliefs, who might not have the same skin color. Who may have a superior product or service to one or more of the established players. Who are free to sit at the same tables as oligarchs and take up space because their government gives them the power to do so. De regulation gives the illusion of a market being free, by making it so that if you want to be a new player in the game, you can, but unless you pay obeisance to the top players, you're not getting very far. Plus the top players will buy you out, which is essentially them bribing you to walk away from the table.
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That's why an oligarchy is NOT the same thing as capitalism. You cannot have a free market if an oligarchy exists. Additionally, the four foundational principles of capitalism are:
- The right to own property and work for your own well being.
- The right to own the profits of your labors, after modest taxation.
- Laws and regulations to prevent corruption.
- The enforcement of those laws and regulations.
Edit: wow, the spelling errors sure make that seem crazy as hell. Fixed.
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I'll go extra-spicy and point out that there's no such thing as "ownership" as we know it without government. Legal-wonkishly, ownership is enforceable, transferrable, exclusive title to property. I can "own" land that I'm only physically present on for a few days per year because my name is on a piece of paper in a file cabinet in a government office, and it's backed up by a court system and police force that's constituted and willing to enforce my title.
I just mention it because a lot of the deregulation whiners are the same people as the "taxation is theft" whiners.
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Oh boy. You struck gold here.
The US Constitution is the highest form of trade pact. That is all the federal government exists for, is to facilitate trade. Catching murderers, building roads, investing in education, stopping infectious disease... All there to keep us working, buying, and trading goods and services because without that whole segments of society starve and start wars.
I love how dumb the anti-taxation argument is because they have zero idea that they wouldn't have any money, or jobs, without the government doing what it does with all that tax money.
Also, never forget that when you work for a wage you are selling your time. Looking at it that way changes how you feel about your life and job. It is 100% a choice that you make because the trade is worth the pay. If not, make yourself more valuable and get out. (It would take too long to explain how that works with disabilities and government aid).
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Also, and this is a spicy one but backed by basic economics, regulations are a required element to capitalism
Indeed the free market itself has demanded regulations, hence why they exist. And the regulations don't actually per se stop crime, they simply give a quick mechanistic action afterwards to getting retribution when the regulations are violated - they bankrupt corrupt businesses over time.
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Or, they balance the benefits of corrupt practices with equally detrimental (to the corrupt entity) costs. Making them less profitable than fair trade.
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We didn't regulate the housing market after 2008 cause the people with money were already getting in the driver seat and wouldn't have it.
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Obama put in some regulations on the investment industry with the intent of preventing another sun-prime /derivative crisis.
And Trump removed those protections a few years later for no other reason that Obama had implemented it in the first place.
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Speaking of Americans, at least half of us are criminally uneducated and watch literally nothing but Fox News. You can't teach them even with indisputable proof. If the talking heads say it's bad, then it's bad.
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Framing one half of the population as beyond saving or inherently evil is not just lazy - it’s historically dangerous. It reduces millions of individuals into a caricature and gives people permission to treat them with contempt, as if that’s somehow virtuous. That kind of thinking has been used to justify some of the worst things we’ve done to each other as humans.
When you actually talk to people outside your bubble, you quickly realize that most of us want the same basic things - stability, safety, meaning, a fair shot in life. We just have different beliefs about how to get there. Writing off entire groups as irredeemable only erodes any future possibility of understanding or change.
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For fucks sake, this whole "let's all hold hands and sing Kumbaya" response is pure garbage. They're trying to pull that "oh, it's just different opinions" crap, but that's a load of bullshit. We're not talking about whether pineapple belongs on pizza here. We're talking about a movement built on lies, hate, and actively trying to undo hundreds of years of suffrage and civil rights movements that allow you to have free speach.
This ain't about "different beliefs on how to get there." Half these people are living in a fantasy world where facts don't matter and anyone who doesn't look or think like them is the enemy. You can't "understand" someone who thinks immigrants are poisoning the blood of America or that the last election was stolen with zero proof. That's not a "belief"; that's a dangerous delusion.
And this whole "tolerance" nonsense? Please. You don't tolerate people who want to strip away your rights or incite violence against your neighbors. That's not virtuous; that's being a damn doormat. Some ideas are just plain wrong, and some people are so far gone on the Fox News Kool-Aid that they're beyond reason. Pretending otherwise is just enabling the madness.
The Paradox of Tolerance is akin to an invading force telling the insurgence that no one else has to die as long as they comply.
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I agree with you. No one is beyond saving, education, or help. Some people seem irredeemable, and they may decide to act that way, but the option is always there. This idea is the core, it's fundamental to my moral code my beliefs, my ethics. Everyone can learn and grow, and it takes serious damage to remove that capability.
However, we're dealing with people who are denying our right to exist and don't engage in good faith. Until they can take those basic steps affirming the social contract, I see no reason debate with such people needs to take place with words.
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Pure unadulterated capitalism means adulterated bread, wine, and milk.
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KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY BREADED MILK-WINE!
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You mean like milk with bird flu, or bread with a dozen ingredients?
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Aluminum sulfate in the bread, anti-freeze in the wine, and chalk in the milk.
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What is so incredible is that we are living st a time with such massive food surplus that it would blow the mind of anyone living in the past... but they will let all of it go to waste and just add bullshit to the food just because they can...
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And make it unaffordable, because fuck it why not
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Two for one deal of fucking everyone over.
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The absolute surplus afforded to us by modern farming and then the waste of so much of it will never cease to piss me off and will likely piss me off more in the future when we lose it to climate change.
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You don't know half of it. The sheer amount of overwork farmland is going through world wide is causing soil depletion like no tomorrow. We may even end up seeing a full blown worldwide famine in some years time when it gets to the point that we simply cannot revitalize farm land.
We produce such an incredible glut of food it isn't funny. If we took all the surplus that we make we could feed the whole of China for an entire year. That is how much is being thrown to waste.
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No, we aren't- the current solar maximum while we have record heat and while the ozone is diminishing means we have mass death speeding up.
This is actually worse than you realize, because normally the solar maximum in the past DID mean peak crop yields and more food for animals and people. So much so a farmer in the 1800s predicted much of the stock market peak and troughs based on the solar cycle. The PEAKS were at solar maxiumums.
https://www.therationalinvestor.com/blog/how-the-benner-cycle-predicts-100-years-of-market-movement
So we should actually be at a food surplus/peak but climate change etc is so bad (we are past 6 maybe 7 of 9 boundaries to live on earth) that we are dying and animals are dying. Mass, MASS deaths of insects and birds and sea life. We probably don't have enough food worldwide any more, not this year at least. In the past, yes, sure. But presently, I'm not so sure. Maybe. But a lot of animals have died including from bird flu.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
https://www.livescience.com/heatwave-cooks-sealife-to-death.html
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/nearly-billion-monarch-butterflies-vanished-since-1990
https://www.thecooldown.com/outdoors/declining-bird-populations-report-cornell-lab/
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/INSECT-APOCALYPSE/egpbykdxjvq/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/16/climate-change-triggers-earthquakes-tsunamis-volcanoes
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Regulations, and safety laws, and labor laws are WRITTEN IN BLOOD. People have literally died for every regulation we have on the books, it’s WHY the laws were written
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And lawsuits
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I'm all for safety regulations and laws, but I also understand why people are frustrated with them.
People writing the laws or corporate policies are incredibly lazy and just copy paste a bunch of stuff to where it's not really required imo.
Like workcrews must always have a hardhat on. Then there are landscapers working in a garden pulling weeds even if there are no trees for miles. What's going to happen? A tornado throws a rake at your head?
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Then there are landscapers working in a garden pulling weeds even if there are no trees for miles. What’s going to happen?
As someone who used to be an operations manager for several work-crews, I fully understand why you would just make a fucking blanket-rule. Because the more people you put on a work crew, the more obvious and stupid risks they will take. It was a daily struggle to get people to wear glove and eye protection using hammers, and the times that I didn't enforce it as a "do it or get sent home" rule, can you guess what happened?
No really, we were on first-name basis with people at the urgent-care center my company worked out a deal with.
Sure the day that they're raking the yard there's no chance of someone suffering a head-injury. Until one of them is loading the wheelbarrow back on the truck and didn't bother lowering the lift-gate because they chose to load their buckets and tools first and didn't want shit to fall out of the back of the truck, then the goddamn wheelbarrow falls and lands on Martinez's head and now he needs stitches and X-rays and is off the team for a week and we have another worker's comp claim and everyone's paycheck suffers for it.
We wouldn't need PPE rules and a thousand other safety regulations if people were always smart, alert and watching for hazards. They're not. They're incredibly dumb. Everyone is. So we need blanket-rules.
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That is a great example.
What happens when that crew is called to work next week where there are trees? Without that rule some businesses would skip buying PPE all together and say "screw it, it's just one day what could happen?" Or they might have PPE that no one takes care of. Someone forgets theirs and no one stops them from working. If you have ever watched an OSHA safety video you know most work place deaths are due to being lazy or stupid.
Most businesses only cares about how much money you make and how much money you cost. That is why we need regulations even when you think they are a pointless waste.
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Also the more exceptions you have to rules, the more confusing it is and the more likely people are going to fuck it up.
"Always wear a hardhat on site" - easy. simple. minimal room for interpretation.
"Always wear a hardhat on site when any of the following conditions are true: [a, b, c, d] unless [e, f]" is going to lead to errors, and then people will get hurt.
People aren't that smart. Especially when they're not motivated, or distracted.
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They also need to be reviewed on a regular basis. If the reason for the regulation is gone it should be dropped. I think every law and regulation should have a nonbinding statement describing the motivation behind it.
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This is true, but it's important to remember that some regulations were not written in blood, but instead in racism - see R1-zoning as one of the most significant examples.
Regulations are just tools, really. They can evidently be used for good, and should be used for good, but some are being used for bad and should be reformed.
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Sure, and such regulations should be reformed. We should not just start turning stuff off and seeing who breaks!
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I wish that would go without saying, but current events are unfortunately evidence of that not being true.
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just to point out the other side of this...
(and I already know I'ma be downvoted for just saying that)
Some regulations are bad. Many are good and we actually need them, but some are bad. For example, when there's a few large companies in an industry, they often lobby for regulations designed to increase the cost of doing business. While the big fish can pay the costs of these extra regulations, smaller companies cant, and just cant compete with the big fish, lowering the amount of competition in the industry and promoting more monopolistic behavior. We saw Openai try to do exactly this back when they went to Congress to warn the senators about the dangers of 'agi' and how it quickly needed to be regulated. Well they failed, and now there's tons of companies with their own products that rival Chatgpt in every way other than the brand recognition.
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The tweet itself limits its scope to food safety regulations specifically. The title of this lemmy post was condensed for brevity, which might create the impression that it's trying to make a larger point about regulations in toto. But I figured I could get away with it because I figured that surely people would read the tweet before commenting.
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People? Read? Never.
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I know, but pretty much every comment on this point about regulation isn't just discussing food regulations, their talking about regulations as a whole. Also my point about some regulations not helping can still be applied to foods.
I mean look at the stuff they say about ketchup:
The consistency of the finished food is such that its flow is not more than 14 centimeters in 30 seconds at 20 °C when tested in a Bostwick Consistometer in the following manner: Check temperature of mixture and adjust to 20±1 °C.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-155/subpart-B/section-155.194 - section B, part 1.
the flow of ketchup does not matter in the slightest to anyone
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There's also regulations that actually hurt the things they are intended to protect. It's generally called perverse incentives. The example here is related to endangered species. It's in the interest of those that find an endangered species on their property to "shovel and shut up" as the presence only creates problems for the owner.
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Reminds me of car startups (in the US) taking off one wheel, turning them into moto/autocycles, so they wouldn't have to go through expensive car certification processes
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Old saying "Fire and flight regulations are written in blood." Food regulations are likely written in various excretions?
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There have absolutely been deaths due to unsafe, mass produced foods.
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Excretions with blood?
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They're the best excretions...
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Puss is an option too
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That's just the free market working as intended. Collateral damage.
Maybe people should do research on the available milk brands before giving it to their children if they didn't want them to drink bleach.
Edit: I tried to resist adding the "/s," but we live in crazy (stupid) times, so...
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The Free Market (holy be thy name) gives you the choice between $1/bottle for milk with chalk and bleach, or $10/bottle for one with less chalk and bleach. If you want one without chalk and bleach, you'll need to find your own cow.
Also, the cows all have birth defects and need uranium-powered antibiotics to stay alive.
Now, let us open our song books to number 34: "Praise Hayek and His Perfect Mustache".
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Blasphemer! In our house we praise Wittgenstein, not that Austrian hack
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Excellent idea! I'm sure that information will be readily available from independent trustworthy sources that are not the government! Failing that, I always have my trusty mass spectrometer in my kitchen and I run all my foods through it just in case!
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With no regulation there will be no other milk brands.
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Maybe people should do research on the available milk brands before giving it to their children if they didn’t want them to drink bleach.
Without regulation, the company could also just lie. Nothing would dictate that they would have to tell the truth about their product.
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Well that's why you need to do your own research. As in looking at products under microscopes, doing physics equations, etc.
If you're not an expert on every product you purchase (and the science behind them), well then that's on you and your kid deserves getting lead poisoning from his band-aids.
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Poe's law and all that
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One of the weirdest aspects of America is that we think people whose job is making money for shareholders should have more power than the public servants we, the public, hire to work for us.
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I think thats just a subset of the whole "Government should be run like a business" mindset.
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There's a hardline belief that any business is automatically more efficient than government because if it weren't it would die from competition, period, end of story. The real equation is that companies are as inefficient as they can afford to be, and the bigger ones can afford plenty. In one of my jobs my manager gave me maybe 2 or 3 weeks of actual work to do in 6 months. In another my team was told to hold off starting a project because there was a change of plan and they didn't know exactly what they wanted. So we just screwed around for a couple months. I won't say what company but in both cases it rhymed with Bicrosoft.
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Corporations wont let us have Medicare for All - why? Why do they ALL lobby so hard against it? It would make their costs cheaper, right? They wouldn't have to pay for our health insurance. Plus we could get medicines so we can be at work more instead of home sick or spreading sickness at work. So it must not be cheaper in some way for them to have Medicare for All - right? Why do they think it would be more expensive for THEM if we all had public health care?
Because that would detect cancer (and toxins) and allow us to class action sue companies for them. Can't sue if it was never detected. Thats why they find carcinogens and lead in kids’ products so much - their products dont have more lead in them, but kids all can be on Medicaid and that catches it. Flint, MI, water poisoning was detected by a kid on Medicaid.
They don't want us to all have healthcare because that is public science and it will absolutely detect what theyve been lying and poisoning us with. It would probably destroy all the big companies like Nestle, Johnson&Johnson, Colgate, etc...
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Public healthcare also removes one of the few leashes they have on workers to keep them in line. My Father in law used to work at a local retail chain in my area, and the pay was straight dogshit, but the health insurance was phenomenal. It kept many workers from leaving for better paying jobs.
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Hands up if you didn't already know that. Or intuited it. To me this seems to be something only US-Americans who argue purely ideologically for a "small government" need reminding of. They're paradoxically often the first in line calling for government intervention when their drinking water is full of poop or something.
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You're free to add your own chalk.
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Most US foods produced under their 'regulations' are forbidden in EU.
And for good reason.-
Now it'll be 10x worse. Just don't eat here and don't buy food from USA. I say this as an American. We are fucked.
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I will link to the 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning.
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Republicans: But we are the ones selling the spoiled milk.
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And if we're all killed, who will the big companies get money from?
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They will market safe food as a new product and charge you more for food that wont kill you.
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Corporations wont let us have Medicare for All - why? Why do they ALL lobby so hard against it? It would make their costs cheaper, right? They wouldn’t have to pay for our health insurance. Plus we could get medicines so we can be at work more instead of home sick or spreading sickness at work. So it must not be cheaper in some way for them to have Medicare for All - right? Why do they think it would be more expensive for THEM if we all had public health care?
Because that would detect cancer (and toxins) and allow us to class action sue companies for them. Can’t sue if it was never detected. Thats why they find carcinogens and lead in kids’ products so much - their products dont have more lead in them, but kids all can be on Medicaid and that catches it. Flint, MI, water poisoning was detected by a kid on Medicaid.
They don’t want us to all have healthcare because that is public science and it will absolutely detect what theyve been lying and poisoning us with. It would probably destroy all the big companies like Nestle, Johnson&Johnson, Colgate, etc…
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Rivers full of industrial waste used to catch on fire, bosses used to lock workers in and let them die in fires(triangle shirtwaist fire),school was only for the wealthy, kids used to work, companies used to poison people en masse and deny it with no consequences(radium girls) work was 12 hours a day 7 days a week(people literally died to change this and trump people voted for this to happen again
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I'll never forget this one guy I know complaining about government regulations. Hes unemployed.
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But if we change from the way we do things now, the opportunity to learn the same lessons all over again, every few decades, might be lost.
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most regulations exist because corporations suck.
Some exist simply to screw people over or charge them money for something they shouldn't have in the first place.
See: Regulations around building structures on private property.
Maybe I'm alone in this one but I don't think I should need to get the cities approval or pay them a licensing fee to build a shed or a tree house in private property. They can lick my sweaty taint for all I care.
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Except when that shed catches a fire and that spreads to your neighbour. Or a part of your tree house breaks off and by freak accident hits neighbour on the other side of fence.
Laws are not written for perfect scenario. Laws are written to prevent the bad scenarios.
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Yes.... Because telling my mom she has to pay the county thousands for a new garden shed, wood shed and chicken coop in her backyard (15 acres btw) is really preventing catastrophe for the neighbors that are literally miles away.
If the regulations can't be written or upheld in a way that allows for property owners to do their own things on their land then they need to be written in a different way or given exception clauses which they currently do not have.
Not everyone lives in a suburb where they can see what their neighbors are cooking for dinner every night. If your property is booty cheek to booty cheek with the neighbors house then sure I can see where you're coming from, but a lot of people have a lot of land far away from others and they are told they can't do x in the middle of nowhere without paying the government some bullshit fee or they are outright denied.
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See: Regulations around building structures on private property.
Even those are based on people doing it wrong in the past and endangering themselves and others.
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If it's on private property who gives a shit. If your idiot son wants to build a structurally questionable tree house and the parents don't do anything about it and he dies that's on them.
I totally understand if they are building shit on a property line and it could fall into the neighbors house or something but most of the time I've seen regulations used against private property owners they are building simple structures hundreds of feet away from neighbors or the edge of property and the government should have absolutely zero say over those types of things.
At that point it's just government overreach and I don't care for it one bit.
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Surely you could've come up with a better example.
Chalk is just calcium carbonate. Modern medicine uses calcium carbonate to as a calcium supplement.
We are still adding things to milk. Any milk that's "calcium fortified" or "extra calcium", and a lot of nut-milks, have calcium carbonate as an ingredient to this day.
I mean, I get your point...honestly, I do...but it's coming across nearly as the same sort of anti-science drivel you'd expect from the counterargument.
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It's not the chalk that's the problem.
It's using it to disguise the fact that the milk you're selling is spoiled.
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In big cities like New York, some dairies fed cows leftover grain mush from distilleries, called swill. The cows were sick, the milk was watery and bluish, and to make it look normal, some sellers added stuff like chalk, flour, even plaster. It wasn’t about hiding spoiled milk like you suggest - it was about making terrible milk from unhealthy cows seem drinkable.
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Yeah. I get that...but the way it was phrased by OOP it was as of "chalk" was used by an example as if that makes it somehow worse. We still put "chalk" in milk, though.
Better example is like those people who say "eww" to hotdogs because there's a regulation limiting how many bug parts are allowed in them...not even considering the alternative of "no limit on how many bug parts".
Or my wife, who refuses to eat a cherry tomato if it fell on the ground.
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Industrial chalk that was used as adulterants wasn't nearly as pure as the calcium carbonate you are imagining
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Plus I can't imagine that a company who is adulterating their milk with chalk dust is going to stop to find and choose a food-safe chalk dust and supplier. They'd just scoop a bunch from whoever's cheapest, and if they adulterate their chalk dust with bleach or something, that'll be going straight into the milk.
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In your examples you know those things are being added to the milk because it's in the ingredients, the case OP mentioned you didn't know. Are you able to see the difference?
And there were many other things added to food besides chalk
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