[ischuldt]

I consider myself to be a left leaning libertarian and the main reason is that to me there is a big difference between regulating individuals personal freedoms and regulating a corporation.

When you try and ban something like marijuana it does you little or no good because people who smoke marijuana want to get high, and when you put up a barricade to them getting high on weed they just find away around that barricade to get high some other way. Either by buying illegal weed, or finding some other drug like meth, or paint that will give them a buzz. The alternatives end up being worse than just letting them smoke in the first place.

When you try and regulate a corporation though it actually does have a positive effect. The reason is because a companies goal isn't to pollute or to provide dangerous working conditions. A companies goal is to make money. If you put up a barrier to them making money by polluting they generally don't find ways around the barricade to continue polluting they find ways around the barricade to keep making money without polluting. That's actually what we want them to do. So the regulation can actually have the positive effect we're looking for.

It's the difference between regulating what goals they can achieve vs regulating the means for them to achieving those goals. The former has a much higher likelihood of success.

[Eridal]

One problem with your oversimplification of regulation is that you are completely leaving out the fact that regulation can increase the prices of good and services above what they would be otherwise.

[Autumnleaf]

Corporations buy their way out of regulation and regular people just have to suck it up and buy a lawyer if they run afoul of regulations.

There should be a name for when the reality doesn't jive with what seems to make sense because it happens quite a bit IRL.

[Eridal]

	Originally Posted by Autumnleaf To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Corporations buy their way out of regulation and regular people just have to suck it up and buy a lawyer if they run afoul of regulations. There should be a name for when the reality doesn't jive with what seems to make sense because it happens quite a bit IRL.

This is a big problem in the patent world where certain companies have attempted to lock down or profit off markets based on vague and questionable patents which have been granted by the government. Patent are just one case of where government regulation has begun to fail miserably and is doing more harm than good overall and is in dire need of reform. Copyright is another one but not quite as bad as patents as the scope is not quite as bad but it is another area where government regulation is attempting to prop up a failing industry.

[Daoist]

Originally Posted by ischuldt To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

When you try and regulate a corporation though it actually does have a positive effect. The reason is because a companies goal isn't to pollute or to provide dangerous working conditions. A companies goal is to make money. If you put up a barrier to them making money by polluting they generally don't find ways around the barricade to continue polluting they find ways around the barricade to keep making money without polluting. That's actually what we want them to do. So the regulation can actually have the positive effect we're looking for.

You'd be surprised at the number of ways it would be possible to get around that. Basically, if you stipulate that any factory making X has to meet certain standards - then they will find ways to redefine X, or "factory." The only way to make the standards universal is to create a market for pollution credits - but even then it would be possible to manipulate the market.

[envirodude]

@OP, you may have just experienced a moment of clarity, congrats.

[Eridal]

	Originally Posted by envirodude To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	@OP, you may have just experienced a moment of clarity, congrats.

I find moments of clarity as typically nothing more than a delusion in which you believe to have a simple insight about something vast and complex but it ends up the truth of the matter is far more nuanced than your insight would leave you to believe.

[Pika]

	Originally Posted by Eridal To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	One problem with your oversimplification of regulation is that you are completely leaving out the fact that regulation can increase the prices of good and services above what they would be otherwise.

In most cases, the intent of regulation is either to force corporations to do business honestly or to force them to pay the full cost of their doing business (ie. stop externalizing their costs). In my experience, most corporations won't do anything that disturbs their bottom line unless they are forced to do so. That is neither bad nor good, it is just corporate behavior. And, this behavior is the reason that regulation came into being in the first place and why it remains necessary.

[Daoist]

A kind of cool thing you can demonstrate in microeconomics by drawing those funny-looking charts with X's: any regulation imposes a cost proportional to the square of the direct cost. People will change their behaviors to avoid the costs, and therefore deviate from what would otherwise be the most optimal behavior.
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	Economic losses due to taxes were evaluated to be as low as 2.5 cents per dollar of revenue, and as high as 30 cents per dollar of revenue (on average), and even much higher at the margins

As for pollution regulations (whether or not actually a tax) - it depends on how well it's crafted. That means taking into account not only the current situation, but how easy it would be for the companies to switch to other alternatives - and the social costs of those alternatives. Otherwise you get these perverse incentives, like polluters avoiding overhauling their factories (as they deteriorate, and thus pollute more) so they can stay within the grandfather clauses.

[Polymath20]

	Originally Posted by Eridal To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	One problem with your oversimplification of regulation is that you are completely leaving out the fact that regulation can increase the prices of good and services above what they would be otherwise.

If the cost isn't picked up by consumers in the prices of their goods and services, then the tab will be picked up by all taxpayers in the form of environmental damage and cleanup efforts.

Economic losses due to things like fishery collapse and heavy metal poisoning are far higher in tax cost than the added cost of regulation in the first place.

[ischuldt]

	Originally Posted by Eridal To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	One problem with your oversimplification of regulation is that you are completely leaving out the fact that regulation can increase the prices of good and services above what they would be otherwise.

It CAN sure. It doesn't always and usually over time it doesn't. Even if it does a little bit it's not a problem because we're paying for more. If the price of cars go up a little bit because the technology required to make them run cleaner in the short term cost money then fine. We're paying a little bit more, but we're getting cleaner air.

Over time once technologies become standard they become cheaper. In fact you could argue the regulation helps that because if only one company puts something like a catalytic converter on their cars each converter will cost more, but when every car company in the US has to have a converter the price of each one will go down because more companies will spring up and compete with each other to build converters.

Just like cars were more expensive before the assembly line made them widely available green energy is more expensive because it cost a lot to developed, but isn't widely used yet. If hypothetically though regulations here put in place requiring each new home to come equipped with solar panels. More businesses would be able to invest in creating them knowing there will be a demand for them in the future.

---------- Post added 05-15-2012 at 10:46 AM ----------

	Originally Posted by Daoist To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	You'd be surprised at the number of ways it would be possible to get around that. Basically, if you stipulate that any factory making X has to meet certain standards - then they will find ways to redefine X, or "factory." The only way to make the standards universal is to create a market for pollution credits - but even then it would be possible to manipulate the market.

While I'm sure there are examples of corporations redefining things to get around some regulations it certainly isn't as easy or as doable as with personal freedoms like doing drugs. I wager you that if drugs were legalized in the US there would be next to 0 increase in the % of people in the country that would start using drugs. Everyone who wants to do them is doing them regardless of the regulation. Where as I've seen countless examples of companies adhering to the regulations imposed on them exactly how it is intended they do so with minimal or no gripping about it to the benefit of both their employees, the American people, and the company itself.

One of the most dramatic instances of this that really solidified my view was a few years ago my state imposed a smoking ban in all public buildings including bars. At first I didn't really care for it because I felt like it was something the government shouldn't really be doing. There was definitely some grumbling early on and threats by bars to defy the regulation, but in the end there are actually probably more people going to the bars in my town today than there were back then. Only the air is about 20 times cleaner. I can actually go to the bar one night and wear the same pare of pants to work the next day.

While the bars grumbled about it at first they're actually happy as hell now because they got to convert their bars to non-smoking which a lot of them already had wanted to do, but they got to do it without fearing that they'd offend regular smoking customers, and lose them to their competition. If the law was repealed today I'm willing to bet there wouldn't be a single bar in my town that would convert back to smoking.

[Polymath20]

Imagine that, business picks up when people know they won't get smogged out.

[Daoist]

Originally Posted by ischuldt To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

While I'm sure there are examples of corporations redefining things to get around some regulations it certainly isn't as easy or as doable as with personal freedoms like doing drugs. I wager you that if drugs were legalized in the US there would be next to 0 increase in the % of people in the country that would start using drugs. Everyone who wants to do them is doing them regardless of the regulation. Where as I've seen countless examples of companies adhering to the regulations imposed on them exactly how it is intended they do so with minimal or no gripping about it to the benefit of both their employees, the American people, and the company itself. One of the most dramatic instances of this that really solidified my view was a few years ago my state imposed a smoking ban in all public buildings including bars. At first I didn't really care for it because I felt like it was something the government shouldn't really be doing. There was definitely some grumbling early on and threats by bars to defy the regulation, but in the end there are actually probably more people going to the bars in my town today than there were back then. Only the air is about 20 times cleaner. I can actually go to the bar one night and wear the same pare of pants to work the next day. While the bars grumbled about it at first they're actually happy as hell now because they got to convert their bars to non-smoking which a lot of them already had wanted to do, but they got to do it without fearing that they'd offend regular smoking customers, and lose them to their competition. If the law was repealed today I'm willing to bet there wouldn't be a single bar in my town that would convert back to smoking.

See my post #9. I'm talking about the second dimension of costs, which creates the squared term. The problem isn't so much people simply evading the regulations - it's the lengths to which they go to do so. To go with your smoking analogy: supposing the law is badly written so that it applies to bars, but not restaurants. Then you might see a lot of bars doing what it takes to become a restaurant - and in the process creating a shortage of bars in town, and a surplus of restaurants.

That sounds like an extreme example, but a lot of the earliest anti-pollution laws were almost as as badly written as that. And if you don't price a resource according to a market, then you will end up simply pushing around the wrinkle in the carpet.

Note that this effect can happen even if it the regulation isn't harmful to business interests. For instance, GM spent tons of effort fighting CAFE standards, before ending up with a fleet even bigger than then market demanded. They do eventually pay for these sorts of mistakes (well, if they're not bailed out), but the point is that consumers can sometimes end up becoming unwitting parties to these sorts of battles as well. (CAFE standards themselves were a pretty badly written political compromise. They said that a manufacturer's fleet had to meet a certain MPG standard...so the car companies ended up pushing cheap small cars, while putting more effort into increasing margins on the less fuel-efficient ones. But nobody is willing to consider higher gas taxes as a solution to anything, so CAFE stays.)

[ischuldt]

	Originally Posted by Daoist To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	To go with your smoking analogy: supposing the law is badly written so that it applies to bars, but not restaurants. Then you might see a lot of bars doing what it takes to become a restaurant - and in the process creating a shortage of bars in town, and a surplus of restaurants.

My point is that your entire argument seems to be based on the law being "poorly written." Sure if laws are poorly written they leave open loop holes and can cause more problems than they solve. The fact that laws can be poorly written isn't a reason not to try.

I don't see a lot of libertarians and conservatives complaining about the language of bills like the new health care package. They want the whole thing repealed under the guise of regulation killing jobs and hurting people. What you're saying though isn't that regulation is bad, you're saying poorly written regulation is bad. Well duh... the solution to that is to work to improve the regulations so it works better and makes more sense not to eliminate it all together.

[Daoist]

^I won't deny the nihlism of many people who can supposedly foresee the hidden effects of every piece of legislation...but the US hasn't created any new markets in these social "bads," so basically every piece of environmental legislation passed thus far has been of the 'pushing around the wrinkle in the carpet' type.

[INTelliJent]

Originally Posted by ischuldt To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Over time once technologies become standard they become cheaper. In fact you could argue the regulation helps that because if only one company puts something like a catalytic converter on their cars each converter will cost more, but when every car company in the US has to have a converter the price of each one will go down because more companies will spring up and compete with each other to build converters. Just like cars were more expensive before the assembly line made them widely available green energy is more expensive because it cost a lot to developed, but isn't widely used yet. If hypothetically though regulations here put in place requiring each new home to come equipped with solar panels. More businesses would be able to invest in creating them knowing there will be a demand for them in the future.

If tech is desirable, it does not take regulation to bring it about. In fact, thanks to government , many techs sit in filing cabinets in the storage of corporations big enough to own the patents, so entrepreneurs cannot bring them to the market.

Originally Posted by ischuldt To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

While I'm sure there are examples of corporations redefining things to get around some regulations it certainly isn't as easy or as doable as with personal freedoms like doing drugs. I wager you that if drugs were legalized in the US there would be next to 0 increase in the % of people in the country that would start using drugs. Everyone who wants to do them is doing them regardless of the regulation. Where as I've seen countless examples of companies adhering to the regulations imposed on them exactly how it is intended they do so with minimal or no gripping about it to the benefit of both their employees, the American people, and the company itself.

Most likely the corporation/business that lobbied for that new higher barrier to entry into the market, since not only do you have to ensure compliance (usually involving the costs of a lawyer, not mentioning the actual cost of compliance), you have to pay for inspections/rubber stamping. Quite the lobbying #win for big businesses.

Originally Posted by ischuldt To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

One of the most dramatic instances of this that really solidified my view was a few years ago my state imposed a smoking ban in all public buildings including bars. At first I didn't really care for it because I felt like it was something the government shouldn't really be doing. There was definitely some grumbling early on and threats by bars to defy the regulation, but in the end there are actually probably more people going to the bars in my town today than there were back then. Only the air is about 20 times cleaner. I can actually go to the bar one night and wear the same pare of pants to work the next day. While the bars grumbled about it at first they're actually happy as hell now because they got to convert their bars to non-smoking which a lot of them already had wanted to do, but they got to do it without fearing that they'd offend regular smoking customers, and lose them to their competition. If the law was repealed today I'm willing to bet there wouldn't be a single bar in my town that would convert back to smoking.

The glaring problem with this example blows me away, particularly in light of your self proclaimed "left leaning libertarianism".

Obviously there is a demand for both smoking and non-smoking establishments. Why should someone be threatened with violence for providing the service for the smokers/threatened with violence for using said service? No one would/should force smokers to go into the non-smoking establishment and vice versa.

[Daoist]

	Originally Posted by INTelliJent To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Most likely the corporation/business that lobbied for that new higher barrier to entry into the market, since not only do you have to ensure compliance (usually involving the costs of a lawyer, not mentioning the actual cost of compliance), you have to pay for inspections/rubber stamping. Quite the lobbying #win for big businesses.

Translation: you just called the OP a corporate tool. Let's see how he responds.

It's interesting how the right has switched their arguments over the last few years from "oh no, you will hurt corporate interests" to "oh no, you will help corporate interests" - often talking about the exact same policies. It's a wonderful rebranding effort, but not particularly reality-based.

Any substance in this post has already been addressed above.

[INTelliJent]

	Originally Posted by Daoist To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	It's interesting how the right has switched their arguments over the last few years from "oh no, you will hurt corporate interests" to "oh no, you will help corporate interests" - often talking about the exact same policies. It's a wonderful rebranding effort, but not particularly reality-based.

Because it can't possibly do both?
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Help some and hurt others? That's kind of the point of corporate lobbying. Gaining an edge through a process other than the market (which means through violence). There's no legitimate difference between sending your own hired thugs to smash your competitor's equipment or lobbying to have them declared illegal, so government thugs shut them down.

[Paul Siraisi]

I guess you'd have to be high to forget what money is worth, so the argument makes sense.

[Doggzilla]

	Originally Posted by Eridal To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	One problem with your oversimplification of regulation is that you are completely leaving out the fact that regulation can increase the prices of good and services above what they would be otherwise.

Fallacy. Firstly, they pay a worker only 7% of profit on average. Secondly, the regulations create more jobs, that money doesnt just disappear. Deregulation hurts everyone. Every industry that has ever been deregulated has crashed and burned. Thats the reason they were regulated in the first place, to improve conditions. Regulations are the alternative to government tax breaks or assistance. Also, simple regulations are always replaced with a mass of less intrusive regulations which add up to almost unbearable pressure on the industries. Trucking and Airlines were just fine with regulation, but when they were deregulated, those regulations were replaced with a thousand smaller regulations that strangled companies. Most of the companies exist solely due to tax breaks, the trucking world is driven by tax breaks. Before deregulation, they just paid the taxes and made loads of profit at the same time.

Pretty much, dereulation leads to exactly the opposite of the intentions. It either breeds massive regulation under different guises, or the industry becomes corrupt and destroys itself, like the housing market.

---------- Post added 05-28-2012 at 10:39 AM ----------

	Originally Posted by Polymath20 To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	If the cost isn't picked up by consumers in the prices of their goods and services, then the tab will be picked up by all taxpayers in the form of environmental damage and cleanup efforts. Economic losses due to things like fishery collapse and heavy metal poisoning are far higher in tax cost than the added cost of regulation in the first place.

Right on

[Polymath20]

Funny story about foresting services:

Initially, they clear-cut whatever land they could get a hold of, then they left.
After a while, they ran out of land to clear-cut.
Then regulations required that they reseed trees after they clear-cut.
Imagine that, the forestry companies have reliable sources of timber, plus relatively safe/protected habitats for wildlife and hunting.

Short-sighted business executives don't necessarily make good long-term financial decisions. When regulations enforce good business-sense, the incompetence of the executives can be partially masked.

[Eridal]

Originally Posted by Doggzilla To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Fallacy. Firstly, they pay a worker only 7% of profit on average. Secondly, the regulations create more jobs, that money doesnt just disappear. Deregulation hurts everyone. Every industry that has ever been deregulated has crashed and burned. Thats the reason they were regulated in the first place, to improve conditions. Regulations are the alternative to government tax breaks or assistance. Also, simple regulations are always replaced with a mass of less intrusive regulations which add up to almost unbearable pressure on the industries. Trucking and Airlines were just fine with regulation, but when they were deregulated, those regulations were replaced with a thousand smaller regulations that strangled companies. Most of the companies exist solely due to tax breaks, the trucking world is driven by tax breaks. Before deregulation, they just paid the taxes and made loads of profit at the same time. Pretty much, dereulation leads to exactly the opposite of the intentions. It either breeds massive regulation under different guises, or the industry becomes corrupt and destroys itself, like the housing market.

If you're going to try and call me out on a fallacy at least try to make a coherent argument which actually includes the small comment I made. Though it is ironic that you try and call me out on a fallacy and then commit one yourself by not even arguing about the essential point I made in my previous statement.

First I never made mention of worker pay which has little to do with regulation and is a separate argument.

Second, you say that every industry that has been deregulated has crashed and burn, which in and of itself is a false, and then go on to say that the "deregulation" was followed by a series of smaller regulations so tell me is the industry regulated or not? By your own statements you admit that deregulation is anything but what it says. Instead it is simply the shifting of the manner in which the industry is regulated so therefore it is not a good example to use when debating whether regulations are good or bad in general.

Lastly, none of what you said goes against my basic point which was the regulations can increase the cost of goods and services.

[Doggzilla]

	Originally Posted by Eridal To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Lastly, none of what you said goes against my basic point which was the regulations can increase the cost of goods and services.

So this is only about the cost? That would be very ignorant of you to bring up this topic and not expect the inevitable results of deregulation to be discussed. What you said it technically true. It "can" increase costs. It rarely does, just as regulating the emissions of trucks did not. In fact, regulating that actual reduced costs by increasing fuel economy by 30-50%, while the cost of trucks remained in line with inflation.
Using your own line of reasoning, reindeer "can" fly.... if you drop them out the back of a C-130. The power of "can".