I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?

Congress. The courts have clumsily dismantled the administrative state. But there are more options than an unchecked executive and unaccountable unelecteds.

I don't agree. The division of power is most likely preferable. Otherwise the politician also become the beurocrat but way more arbitrary.

Under Chevron we had the opposite of that: bureaucrats who had ridiculously wide latitude to make their own rules.

What we actually need is for congress to take back control instead of passing all power and authority to the executive branch.

I don’t think it’s workable. At best it just swaps lobbyists for civil servants.

On paper it's different but in practice congress would largely be rubber stamping things. I predict the differences would be largely negative. More room for non-experts to meddle, more room for lobbyists to insert themselves into the process, and more room for broad capture of the advisory body to go unnoticed.

Nothing will work when the courts decide giving money is speech and now protected. Super pacs have unlimited spending and shield donors.

It's hard to change. You need a new supreme court or amendment to remove super pacs then you need to convince the people who got in power by having more money to limit donations to an amount an average American can afford. Then you need laws to fix gerrymandering or possible an amendment. Then you need radical laws to deal with immigration vote buy which mlght involve rules not allowing people not born in the country from voting.

And then we will realize that people with more money will actually need more power because they have bigger needs. So they will start buying people through convert ways (media ownership, ai filtered data, ...) and we'll have more disinformation. Maybe this is the best democracy can offer.

I don't know what the exact solution is, but something needs to change in the structure and incentives of congress to incentivize them to exercise power again. Eliminating the filibuster and drastically increasing the total number of representatives seem like the best ways to me, but I'm open yo other possibilities.

The government is good and does good things. We need more of it not less.

If you actually believe this is true, I have some sad news for you. Does the term "regulatory capture" mean anything to you?

> those awful technocrats

If you actually believe the "technocrats" have the knowledge required to craft regulations that actually are a net benefit, again, I have some sad news for you.

There is another option, which is to not dictate rules at all, unless you absolutely have to in order to have a civil society in the first place. For example, we have laws against things like murder and theft and fraud, because you can't have a civil society if those things aren't deterred and punished.

But the vast majority of the laws and regulations we have in place now are not doing that. They're attempts to micromanage from the top something that fundamentally cannot be micromanaged from the top. Nobody has enough knowledge to do that. So we should stop doing it.

For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).

Nor is it what I advocated.

> Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity

That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their markets.

> allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.

Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened?

> Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).

You're assuming that food and water providers would be able to do such things in a "free market". But doing such things is obviously bad for business, so providers would have a strong incentive not to do it in a free market, since in a free market, doing things that are bad for business makes you go out of business.

In our current regulatory environment, however, large corporations can do many things that are bad for business, as long as they can get government regulators to agree to let them. For an example from a few years ago, a major aicraft manufacturer got the FAA to approve a change to one of its oldest aircraft types that ended up killing two airplanes full of people. How? Because the FAA didn't even look at the change: the "regulation" had evolved to the point where the FAA just took the manufacturer's word for it that everything was OK.

In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business. But of course in our current regulatory environment that can't happen, because regulation has forced aircraft manufacturers to amalgamate to the point that neither of the two biggest ones can ever be allowed to go out of business--too many long chains of dominoes, including much of the US's military capability (and not just in airplanes), depend on them.

Tell me again how regulations make things better?

> humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years

You really can't compare pre and post industrial revolution like that. Large scale synthesis of toxic chemicals as a byproduct of some unrelated industry just wasn't a thing previously.

> In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business.

Extremely doubtful. Air travel has been intentionally pushed to a ridiculously high level of assurance by regulation. I don't think the free market would have selected for the current cost vs safety balance on its own.

I appreciate where you're coming from, that a large portion of existing regulation is gratuitous, being structured the way it is primarily for the benefit of the incumbent. But that doesn't mean that such regulation isn't doing anything useful at the same time.

Possibly not. Possibly in a free market people still would fly on an aircraft type that was known to have had two recent crashes that killed everyone on board. I wouldn't, but perhaps I'm an outlier.

But if people would be willing to fly on such an aircraft in a free market (which means that the value of flying on it, to them, is greater than the cost, even including the expected cost of the risk of a fatal crash), then the logical consequence is not that our air travel regulations are doing good; it's that our air travel regulations are overestimating (possibly drastically) the value we actually put on human life, and therefore are diverting large amounts of resources to things that actually are worth less to us than they cost. That's not a net benefit.

(also, without the safety reporting infrastructure and mandatory disclosures the average person would have absolutely no ability to learn whether the crashes said anything about the safety of the aircraft as a whole. You'd have never known about the 737 Max crashes otherwise, just like if you've ever flown before you evidently didn't know about the last couple of crashes that aircraft type had that killed everyone on board...)

In addition to all the other things I pointed out, there's a very simple and obvious difference between this and the airplane case: a person choosing to drive drunk imposes some risk on everyone else who uses the same road they do. But a person choosing to fly on an unsafe airplane imposes no risk on anyone but themselves; their choice doesn't force anyone else to fly on the same airplane.

There is a very simple and very obvious similarity which is that people do not consent to be hit by drunk drivers or poorly maintained aeroplanes. Hence we regulate.

Honestly, I find it unfathomable that you could write so many words across two comments trying to reinvent aviation safety from first principles and not grasp this.

True.

> or poorly maintained aeroplanes

But that's not something a person can affect by their choice of whether to fly on such an airplane, which is what we've been talking about, assuming the airplane is already in operation. That risk is being imposed by the airline that's skimping on the maintenance.

People can affect this indirectly, by choosing not to fly on unsafe airplanes, which will cause airlines that try to operate such airplanes to go out of business (as well as manufacturers who try to build them). Indeed, that's what I was describing when I described how a free market would result in unsafe airplanes not being flown.

Your position, in the other subthread where I responded to you a little bit ago, appears to be that people are too stupid (excuse me, "unworldly") to be trusted to regulate such things as I've described in a free market, so governments have to regulate instead. Have I got that right?

No, that's something you are talking about as you avoid the actual argument that badly flown and maintained aircraft represent a threat to people that didn't make an informed choice to fly on them.

One could also argue that drink driving regulation is unnecessary because in a free market nobody will choose to drive drunk, and this would be somewhat less stupid than arguing that it's unnecessary to regulate aviation safety because it would be impossible to operate an airline without equivalent or better safety records in a free market.

> Your position, in the other subthread where I responded to you a little bit ago, appears to be that people are too stupid (excuse me, "unworldly") to be trusted to regulate such things as I've described in a free market, so governments have to regulate instead. Have I got that right?

My actual argument is that badly flown and maintained aircraft represent a threat to people that didn't make an informed choice to fly on them

But yes, governments also protect people whose confidence they know better than the stupid experts is exceeded only by their ignorance.

So our airline safety regulations have nothing to do with the safety of the, um, passengers?

As I said in another of our subthreads (and you agreed), evidently we don't have enough common ground to have a useful discussion. Have a nice day.

I'd say it was like arguing with a toddler, but that's unfair because I'd expect many toddlers to understand "even if people want to fly really dangerous aeroplanes, that might not be fair on who they crash into".

You're assuming there is just one such value. There isn't. People who are willing to drive drunk put less value on human life than people who aren't. We deal with that by penalizing people for driving drunk, to give them another incentive not to do it. And, as you say, we do that because people who drive drunk are doing it on the same roads as everyone else, and many if not most people have to use the roads as part of their daily lives, and they value their lives more than the people who choose to drive drunk do.

Also, the person who drives drunk bears risk--they can get injured or killed themselves. They can control that risk

Air travel is not like that. Most people do not have to travel by air as part of their daily lives. Plus, the people who design, build, and maintain the airplanes are not the ones who bear the risks of a crash: the crews and passengers do. So the incentives involved are different.

But there's another aspect to this as well. An airline is not going to operate an airplane unless they can sell enough seats to make it profitable, and not just for one flight, for the expected lifetime of the airplane. So we're not talking about one person choosing to drive drunk. We're talking about enough people choosing to fly on an airplane type that's known to have had fatal crashes due to a design flaw, for a long enough time to make it profitable for an airline to operate that airplane. That is the hypothetical I was responding to, and in that hypothetical, you can't make the kind of argument you're making, that it's a small minority of obvious outliers who are making what you consider to be the "bad" choice.

And it wasn't my hypothetical, I was just responding to it. I actually don't agree with its premise: I don't think that in a free market enough people would choose to fly on such an airplane to make it profitable for an airline to operate it. And at least one reason why I believe that is the differences between that hypothetical scenario, and the current reality of some people choosing to drive drunk, which I've just described.

> without the safety reporting infrastructure and mandatory disclosures the average person would have absolutely no ability to learn whether the crashes said anything about the safety of the aircraft as a whole

Straw man. In a free market where people knew they could not depend on the government to "regulate" (and, as I've pointed out, it didn't in this case), people would refuse to fly on airplanes whose safety records were not well-documented and attested public knowledge. To do otherwise would be obviously foolish. The only reason people don't seek out more such information now is that they believe the government has their back so they don't have to. And that belief, as we've seen, is not justified. In a free market, indeed, a safety reporting infrastructure not very different from what we have now would be expected to evolve--but because it was not run by a government and could not take advantage of the free pass the government gets to skimp on regulations, it would have to build and maintain a justified track record of accuracy.

> You'd have never known about the 737 Max crashes otherwise

You must be joking. They were worldwide news. We didn't need government safety reporting to tell us that two 737 Max aircraft crashed killing everyone on board. Which all by itself would make any sane person not want to fly on a 737 Max aircraft until they understood what had happened and were convinced the root cause had been fixed.

Indeed, the safety reporting system, if anything, contributed to facilitating the crashes--by not bringing to light the many instances of reports by pilots of US flag air carriers about odd behavior of 737 Max aircraft in exactly the same conditions that led to the two crashes. The existence of those reports only came to light, as far as the public was concerned, after the fact, when it was too late.

LMAO. Perhaps leave lecturing what transport looks like in the absence of regulation to people who've actually seen what transport looks like in the absence of any effective regulation (hint: the public does not rely on independent safety reports or indeed have access to much accident reporting at all, the transport is usually [over]full, and yes it kills a lot more people than commercial aircraft, sometimes including people that didn't consent to use the transport). Even specifically within the sphere of aviation there's this not-that-little country called Indonesia whose airlines were banned from operating in the West for a long time because of an extremely well known lack of adequate safety standards, and an accompanying tendency to plunge passengers to a fiery death. It was one of the fastest growing air transport markets in the world.

People whose extreme ignorance of transport safety is exceeded only by their overconfidence they'd do a better job than the regulators are of course precisely the people such regulation aims to protect.

> You must be joking. They were worldwide news

They were worldwide news because of mandatory disclosures and independent safety regulation which in unregulated transport environments simply do not exist. If these did not exist, you would have no reason to assume that aircraft crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia have any bearing on the safety of your flight in the USA. (You're evidently not aware of the other six serious crashes involving Lion Air, the operator of the first Boeing 737 Max across its first two decades of operation, and certainly won't have boycotted the aircraft types involved as a result). If you wanted to get a bus or ferry in Indonesia, you wouldn't have the first clue which ones operated to adequate safety standards or not. This is not because Indonesians trust their government; it is because the libertarian fantasy of independent third parties seamlessly filling in the knowledge gaps is not a reality. Take it from someone that actually spent the first part of their career working for a company that collected data on the aviation sector...

So why is that? Because Indonesians don't value human life the way people in the US do? Maybe that's true. Maybe there's a much wider variation in the world as far as how humans value human life, than we Westerners assume. And if that's the case, then maybe Indonesia's unsafe airlines are fine for Indonesians. But that doesn't mean that the same sort of thing would happen in the US if people in the US understood that government regulation could not be relied on to protect them from unsafe airplanes.

Or do Indonesians want safer airplanes, but can't get them? Why not? And if they want safer airplanes but can't get them, why do they fly on the unsafe ones?

> it is because the libertarian fantasy of independent third parties seamlessly filling in the knowledge gaps is not a reality.

Why doesn't this happen in Indonesia? Because the Indonesian government keeps it from happening? Historically that's the reason: governments can't regulate, but also can't allow third parties to provide the information the government can't, because that would undermine their power.

Honestly, if you're so naive about how the adult world works that you think the most likely reason why unconnected third parties don't get access to all the information required to properly audit an airline's safety practices (even if they've somehow found a B2C business model to conduct such audits) is that the government stops them, you're precisely the sort of uworldly person such regulation is intended to protect. Well, you and the people that don't trust in unregulated airlines but run the risk of being hit by their aircraft anyway....

I have never claimed "much better". But given the overall track record of government regulation in actually protecting people from the harmful things it's supposed to protect them from, it would be hard for any private effort to do worse. If you disagree with that, evidently we don't live on the same planet and there's not enough common ground between us for a useful discussion.

That said, perhaps it might help if I rephrase things somewhat. I'm accepting, at least for the sake of argument, your claim that, for example, Indonesians have no way of getting any reliable information about which buses, ferries, etc. are safe (and that the same was true of airplanes for many years, but perhaps that's changing now).

And that makes me wonder: why do people even use these things, if they have no information about their safety? Or why don't they find some way of getting the information? Why can't someone start a business that provides it? Would people just not pay for it because they think such information should be free? What's the mindset here? Am I really that much of an outlier, that it seems obviously foolish to me to be using these things if you have no way of getting reliable information about their safety? Is Indonesia, for example, really full of such "unworldly" people who need to be protected from their own unworldliness?

You call such ideas as starting a business to provide people with such information a "libertarian fantasy". To me the fantasy is the idea that government regulation can be depended on to "protect" the "unworldly" people who otherwise will happily do unsafe things. As I said above, the overall track record of government regulation gives no basis for any such belief.

> you're precisely the sort of uworldly person such regulation is intended to protect

I don't know where you're getting this from, since I've already said elsewhere in this thread that I personally would not fly on an airplane whose safety record I have no reliable information about. It's quite true that my current best source of such information is the US government. But that doesn't mean that situation is the best that can be done.

> the people that don't trust in unregulated airlines but run the risk of being hit by their aircraft anyway

I don't know what you mean by this.

Yes, evidently we don't. On the one hand, I live in a world in which regulation has ensured that a thin aluminium tube fuel of highly flammable fuel which takes off and lands at several hundred mph and is the paradigm example of "how metal fatigue causes things to break in unexpected ways" on engineering courses is actually the safest form of transport by some margin, with aviation safety records being strongly correlated with levels of regulation. On the other hand you think the Wild West and Somalia represent safety models it should move towards.

Honestly, if you have so little grasp of how the world of business works that you think the biggest obstacle to some random third party conducting an audit of an airline's operations, maintenance and safety practices to share with consumers is the government (you honestly can't grasp that the airline needs to cooperate and almost certainly doesn't want to?!?!) maybe it's for the best we don't take your advice on how to improve the industry...

> I don't know what you mean by this.

I can see how the concept that unregulated airlines' planes can crash into people who didn't choose to fly with them is very difficult to understand if you are either four years old or four comments deep into insisting that poorly maintained aircraft crashing isn't a problem because the people on the plane made rational and informed choices to be there

Even given the current environment Boeing still tried to (unsuccessfully) shift blame away from themselves. Imagine how that might have gone differently in a "free market" where "unencumbered" by regulation there wasn't even proper investigation or disclosure.

More generally, you seem to be approaching this with the a priori assumption that whatever the free market would arrive at is the correct result. Given that we're considering the merits of various regulations it seem to me that begs the question.

Straw man. As I pointed out in another post upthread, in a free market, nobody would fly on Boeing aircraft (or anyone's aircraft) if they did not have a well documented and attested safety record, and independent parties would be in the business of documenting and attesting to such things. And since those independent parties would not be able to get the free pass the government gets to skimp on regulations as they did with Boeing, they would have to build and maintain a track record of accuracy.

The only reason people don't seek out such information independently now is that they believe the government has their back so they don't need to. Which, of course, is an unjustified belief.

> you seem to be approaching this with the a priori assumption that whatever the free market would arrive at is the correct result.

I have made no such assumption. There is no single "correct result", and people like me who favor free markets don't do so because we think they can produce any such thing. We favor free markets not because we think they are perfect, but because the alternatives are even worse.

The history of government regulation bears this out. Sure, when everything is going nicely, regulation looks good, and it's easy to talk about how a "free market" (which actually just means "if this particular regulation were to suddenly go away without anything else changing", which is a straw man) would be worse.

But the failure modes of government regulation are worse than those of a free market. The failure mode of a free market is that transactions that could create value don't happen--people don't fly because they can't get reliable information about aircraft safety, for example, so airlines go out of business and a lot of potentially valuable things can't happen because they would need air travel as an enabler. The failure mode of government regulation, as we've seen, is that people are killed out of the blue because the government they thought was protecting them, wasn't.

Even if you eliminated the immunity shield for corporate leadership so they couldn't skate after their company goes bankrupt, there would still be innumerable risk-takers willing to gamble with human lives to make more money.

I expect the argument you want to make is that having people harmed and killed is an acceptable sacrifice for greater economic efficiency, but you're aware that it doesn't play well — especially when the benefits of economic efficiency tend to flow to the people doing the killing rather than the people being killed.

To the extent it's true that being "bad for business" is no longer enough of a disincentive for corporations, as I've already said, one key reason is that the corporations have bought regulations that favor them and disfavor potential competitors.

It's true that that's not the only factor involved. Corporate governance is broken. A big part of that is also government regulation, which does to some extent prevent outright fraud (for example, the S&L debacle in the 1980s), but is perfectly fine with other practices, like golden parachutes for executives and corporate takeovers in which the buyer gets the assets but offloads the liabilities on the taxpayers, that do just as much damage, if not more. All of these things are regulated--but the regulations don't stop harm from being done.

There is one other factor that works against corporate governance which is not, in itself, a product of government regulation: the fact that most share ownership now is not individual stockholders but mutual funds. That means most people don't even know what corporations they own even small pieces of. But mutual funds are a big advantage for most people investing for their retirement, because they're an obvious hedge against risk, so they would exist even in a true free market without any government regulation. The problem is that, as far as the individual corporations are concerned, their time horizon is now much shorter. The mutual fund has to care about providing returns over a long time horizon, because it's holding people's retirement accounts, which might not be drawn on for decades. But the corporations only see short term trades being made, many of them by those same mutual funds, trying to increase their returns. So corporations have to focus much more on short term returns instead of long term planning.

That would be one area where a government ought to be able to improve things, because a government's time horizon ought to be long-term. But it isn't. Government's time horizon is the next election. So even in this area, governments are actually worse than corporations.

I have no idea where you're getting this from; the argument I'm making is nothing at all like this. Indeed, I have pointed out many bad things that still exist even in the presence of massive government regulation, and are not stopped by such regulation even though they are exactly the kinds of things the regulation was supposed to stop. That is the opposite of what you are claiming my argument is.

> One can only make such an argument by being offensively ignorant of history.

I pointed out elsewhere in the thread who I think is ignorant of history, and it isn't me.

The current federal limits include:

  Cyanide: 0.2 mg/L

  Uranium: 30 µg/L

  Gross alpha particles: 15 picocuries per liter (pCi/L).  Beta particles and photon emitters: 4 millirem/year dose equivalent

The current US code, printed as a book, could not be read in five lifetimes of daily 9-5 reading. Make reading the law aloud a requirement of their job -- they're not permitted to stop until they've completed it, except they may sleep at night and they may assemble to vote to remove laws which are no longer needed. Failure to read the laws at the start of their tenure results in being held in federal court for the duration of their time in office.

Congress knew of that issue; for decades, Congress has delegated the nitty gritty to regulatory agencies, who employ said experts.

SCOTUS, on the other hand, are the idiots you seek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...