A good example of beneficial government regulation, for people who refuse to believe such a thing exists. (Another good example is the Internet itself, but it's best to start small)
It's also a good example of good EU regulation. There are many in the UK who think the EU does nothing but regulate bendy bananas. The EU brings a lot of good law for the little guy to the UK (and other EU states)
Living in the UK, the thought of the UK potentially withdrawing from the EU is terrifying - so many of the complaints about the EU are about areas where the EU are interfering in absolutely awful attempts by UK politicians to restrict peoples rights.
It's even worse when they complain about things that are independent of the EU, but still blame the EU, such as which often happens with decisions from the European Court of Human Rights.
I think most people who tend to oppose regulation do so not because they believe a beneficial government regulation is impossible, but because the net effect of government regulation is negative.
Yes, a good piece of regulation, but who believes in no regulation? To me, no regulation means no law, which means anarchy. And the only people who want anarchy are the same types of people who would be dead the first day it broke out.
But much of the regulation in the US is regulatory capture. We need regulation for the people, not for the companies. Moving in the right direction is a challenge and we need to break down the illusion that half the population is for good (those on our voting team) and the other half for bad.
So I commented on your first paragraph just to make a joke, then I read your second.
There is no reason to believe that cross-party unity would solve anything, and plenty to make us think it would make things way worse. Two parties that are friendly and cozy with each other are equivalent to a single party. That will leave US voters with no real choice at the ballot box, and remove the only real repercussion to a politician - the fear that their opponent will take them to task during the next election.
Partisan politics is the most powerful tool we have to preventing politicians from running rampant with power. Heaven help us if they ever unite against their common enemy - the people.
I think poof31's idea of cross-party unity is less about the PARTIES and more about the POPULATION.
Meaning that the political parties do a pretty slick divide & conquer on highly polarizing topics that give half the population a reason to "hate" the other half despite the fact that both generally want the same thing.
Most people actually don't want regulatory capture since most people aren't in a position to benefit from it. But it happens because half the people "want" it on some topics because their party says "this is necessary for us not to get screwed!" and people generally go with the party line. And then on other topics the other party convinces its constituents that this other kind of regulation is necessary (which again has lots of regulatory capture built in) and their voters generally agree and support it.
If it wasn't for the few highly polarizing topics splitting the population pretty evenly some stuff could actually get done.
Worse is that the vast majority of people would actually support rewriting the tax code to greatly simplify it and close loopholes because most people aren't in a position to benefit from said loopholes. But this doesn't get any traction because the representatives from both parties know that they can't for the sake of campaign donations. This is literally in the interests of the people but it doesn't happen because it's not in the interests of the representatives.
Being able to realize that the people of the other party are good folks and that the representatives of both parties aren't so good would be a huge win to trying to solve a lot of the legalized corruption that makes Washington so dysfunctional.
Where does he advocate cross-party unity? He criticizes blind partisanship, and there are plenty of better alternatives to that besides just melding the two major parties into one.
Paradoxically, the current situation of extreme partisanship is close to a single unified party. The parties choose small wedge issues to fight over, and the rest is generally untouched. I won't go so far as to say "both parties are the same", but the differences aren't huge. Health care reform is a big wedge issue right now, and the two sides basically boil down to tweaking the dial on just how much private sector involvement there should be. Foreign policy is portrayed as a big divide, but the two parties seem to just switch sides on that depending on which one has the Presidency. There's no place in a major party for someone who wants to vote on the basis of getting out of the Global War on Terror, or for drug legalization, or single-payer health care, or many other such things.
Right now, the parties don't have to actually compete very much. Most people have chosen a side and stick with it no matter what. If we can get away from the idea that the other side is evil, that would increase the competition between them, not decrease it.
Not really. Friendly relations is a prerequisite for compromise which is a prerequisite for progress. Lots of parties have friendly relations without society collapsing. Your belief is very ignorant and US-centric.
> Friendly relations is a prerequisite for compromise which is a prerequisite for progress.
Ask a professional diplomat whether this idea is true. Israelis and Palestinians achieve compromises all the time -- they're fragile and short-lived, but they're certainly compromises.
Unions and management come to compromises regularly, after sometimes bloody demonstrations (in the early days of the organized labor movement).
In a now-famous story from 1943 Berlin, a group of wives of Jewish men protested and demonstrated against the regime's plan to round up and exterminate their husbands. Because the demonstration took place in Berlin, because of its size and international visibility, and because the wives were not themselves Jewish, the Nazis reached a compromise -- the men were released.
Quote: "As the women continued to protest at Rosenstrasse into March 6, the German leadership finally gave in, even as 25 of the intermarried Jews were being deported to Auschwitz. The Nazi Propaganda Minister, Goebbels released the remaining intermarried Jews in an attempt to maintain the visage of conformity in Berlin. The protests of Aryan women against the internment of their Jewish husbands had shown open dissent to the Nazi program and for Goebbels (with Hitler’s approval), it was more important to eliminate this dissent by releasing those Jews than to allow such dissent to be visible to other Germans or international bodies. Thirty-five intermarried Jews that had already been sent to Auschwitz were also returned. While twenty-five of the detainees were not released, thirty-five intermarried Jews that had already been sent to Auschwitz were also returned to Berlin."
> Friendly relations is a prerequisite for compromise ...
In reality, this is proven false every day.
> Your belief is very ignorant and US-centric.
Your ignorance of both current events and history is embarrassing.
Though I think he is correct that politics does not need to be antagonistic to prevent "politicians running rampant with power". Plenty of democracies use more collaborative politics than the USA (e.g. the Polder model of democracy in the netherlands). And I think most people would agree that the US republicans & democrats could engage more constructively while maintaining ideologically distinct positions (and not turning the country into a single party fascist state).
> I think most people would agree that the US republicans & democrats could engage more constructively while maintaining ideologically distinct positions ...
Yes, absolutely. My point was that compromise doesn't require that the parties share values or show mutual respect -- history proves otherwise.
My problem is that while they fit the literal definition of compromise, they don't really achieve much. Those are barely ceasefires, and not much progress. So compromise without friendly relations does exist, it just really really sucks. The spirit of my criticism still stands.
> My problem is that while they fit the literal definition of compromise, they don't really achieve much.
Compared to what? The OP's contention was that "Friendly relations is a prerequisite for compromise". I proved that false. You're now changing the subject.
> So compromise without friendly relations does exist, it just really really sucks.
So the wives of the doomed Jewish men getting back their husbands really, really sucked? You need to learn a bit of history -- it's replete with valuable compromises between antagonistic parties.
Replace "anarchy" with "self-organization" or "decentralized governance" to make it sound a lot less scary. I've just started a pop econ book on this topic (after watching the author's video) that seems interesting so far.
Anarchy doesn't really exist. It's just that people want to go back to a state before the current contracts and laws were passed. What would happen? The same kinds of associations, rules, and laws would form again.
Anarcho-collectivists, which as far as I understand, represents the dominant modern anarchistic philosophy, examine alternative methods to central government for generating laws. So they don't argue for an unregulated society - which is obviously a non-starter under the lens of reality - or a return to pre-government, but rather a complete replacement of the law-making mechanism.
Basically, they're all over complexity theory and how to use strong local interactions to develop self-organising non-local societies. Which I personally think makes anarcho-collectivism possibly the most sophisticated and futuristic of current political models. They were two decades ahead of the "localism" and "direct democracy" ideologies, and with a far better understanding of the maths.
Do you have any links to writings on this (Anarcho-collectivism from a complexity perspective or vice-versa)? Did both a quick journal search and a Google search and didn't find much.
Sorry for the very late reply, I've been hoping I'd get some time to do this properly, but haven't succeeded. It's something I first read ~10 years ago, where it was mostly in the musings of a complexity theorist. Since then odd things have cropped up which have supported that narrative in my mind, but I haven't got a particularly convincing collection to work with. There's some leads in here though: http://www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk/documents/Anarch....
>And the only people who want anarchy are the same types of people who would be dead the first day it broke out.
This is an amusing statement. What kind of people are you referring to here? Keyboard-warrior lolbertarians, randroids etc? Surely not the black bloc types and their various dog-on-a-string, squat-dwelling, convoy-travelling chums? I would have thought they'd be better equipped than most for a mad max style dystopia...
To me this isn't additional regulation to standard contract law. A transaction is a contract between two parties, if the contract is intentionally deceitful you have the right to dispute it. So this it's great that they're putting it in print, because nobody's going to sue over a couple of items being added to your basket.
> A good example of beneficial government regulation, for people who refuse to believe such a thing exists.
I don't get how people can hold that belief. It falls apart the moment you think about game theory for five minutes, or read up a Wikipedia article about externalities and tragedy of commons.
I don't believe that no beneficial government regulations exist, but I believe the net effect of government regulations is negative. And I would point to game theory (and economics more generally) to support that view.
I think the primary idea is that the economic issues that plague markets also plague governments. Public choice is the discipline of applying economic principles to governments. You can't treat government as a black box to solve economic issues without recognizing that economic issues affect government as well. For example, to theorize a law, regulation, or form of government to solve some economic problem like the public good problem, one must consider that "good government" is also a public good. It's true that a society might fail to produce a public good like flood control systems. But it's necessary to argue why, if the society cannot produce the flood control systems, why it should be expected to produce a government that will produce the flood control systems.
You have a good point here. I agree that governments are not exempt from the game-theoretic rules that affect everything else. While they are an effective solution to coordination problems of society, they suffer from coordination problems of their own (I think that might be one of the reason governments tend to develop layered structures; it's like turtles all way down, but here we have governments all way up).
> But it's necessary to argue why, if the society cannot produce the flood control systems, why it should be expected to produce a government that will produce the flood control systems.
I think one of the arguments for this would be the fact that it actually happens - i.e. people left alone tend to form governments that then make flood control systems :).
From what you wrote in your previous comment I understand that you believe, that if one would sum up all the benefits and all the costs of government regulation, one would end up with a negative number. Have I undestood you correctly? If yes, could you elaborate on why you believe the effect is net negative and not net positive? I.e. what makes the costs bigger than benefits?
> I think one of the arguments for this would be the fact that it actually happens - i.e. people left alone tend to form governments that then make flood control systems :).
I should have said "efficiently produce flood control systems." In other words, produce them in cases where the benefits outweigh the costs, and not produce them in cases where the costs outweigh the benefits. Of course, that's implied in the concept of "public good problem."
> From what you wrote in your previous comment I understand that you believe, that if one would sum up all the benefits and all the costs of government regulation, one would end up with a negative number. Have I undestood you correctly?
Yes, although I fully recognize that there is probably no physical way to measure and agree on each cost/benefit.
> I.e. what makes the costs bigger than benefits?
I think the biggest effect is that concentrated interests tend to beat dispersed interests when they compete to influence a government, and less so when they compete in a market.
But a market for governments does exist. People "buy" or support their governments through elections and immigration.
Edit: On second thought, perhaps you were talking about not a particular government, but a system of government. In that case, immigration is the only choice.
> People "buy" or support their governments through elections and immigration.
True, but elections are plagued by the public good problem, and immigration is in most cases an extremely large transaction cost. There is also obviously some pressure on governments from the threat of violent revolution, but that's an even larger transaction cost and less certain endeavor.
I was thinking about ideologies that work as a proxy for evaluating facts. It's kind of like saying that scientific method is also an ideology. In some sense, it is, but it's the one thing that's not like others.
> I was just thinking that some ideologies seem to exist for the purpose of allowing people to justify their greedy behavior.
Maybe. I try to be more charitable, especially that I know many friends that are (by their own admission [0]) borderline libertarian and are definitely neither greedy nor selfish. I think that it's a way how people respond to governments clearly overreaching with their regulations. It's a kind of cultural backlash, but if you treat it as an ideology, thinking that e.g. Free Markets Are The Best And Government Is Always Evil, then you're throwing baby out with the bathwater and trying to replace a bad hell with a worse hell.
[0] - I try to avoid using such labels, because I think they shut down the mind. I personally might be more liberal on topic A, and lean more conservative on topic B, just because different methods work for different problems. Labeling things by political ideas make people lose that distinction. I've personally been called Marxist And Therefore Wrong by bringing up in a discussion the topic of tragedy of commons, which was immediately labeled as The Part Of Marxist Economy, Not The Real One. sigh
Unfortunately, what may seem to be obvious and apolitical to you inevitably steps on the toes of other techies on this forum who sees things otherwise. I don't see a way for this story not to be political. (Though that's no excuse for any of to be impolite, if that's what you're getting at. [Which is not to say that the swipe you mentioned was impolite.])
Actually as one of the people I think you're talking about (though as someone else noted I don't know if your description of radical free-market types is perfectly accurate, it's really about net benefit) this concerns me. In principle it seems to be banning fraud, and if that's all it does then I can't really complain. But to say "you can't structure your site in such a way" I think it's rather heavy handed. I guess it comes down to how it's enforced. Given the way governments generally are, there's going to be some sort of government agency with an official review process for websites, it's going to bog everything down, things will get developed much more slowly. This is a hidden cost. The web is a very agile industry, so this would be particularly painful. So until you can quantify this cost, you can't argue that this is unquestionably a beneficial regulation.
I think a better way (though maybe with lesser hidden costs) to deal with it would be to declare that such dark patterns constitute fraud. That way, a customer is free to sue a company for committing it. Then the incentives are placed on the company not to set up these patterns. If there's a grey area, it's not the job of a bureaucrat to prescribe, it's the job of a consumer to decide if they've been defrauded, then judge to agree or not, and also the company to make a risk trade off, and so forth. Much less rigid that way.
Given the way governments generally are, there's going to
be some sort of government agency with an official review
process for websites
With a lot of consumer rights in the UK, the principle is that you don't need prior approval or proactive monitoring, instead relying on complaints from the injured party to identify violations.
So assuming 99% of websites comply with the law, 99% of websites have no need for any sort of official review.
> In principle it seems to be banning fraud, and if that's all it does then I can't really complain. But to say "you can't structure your site in such a way" I think it's rather heavy handed.
What if the only way to ban fraud is to say you can't structure it this way? Pyramid schemes seem like a good example.
>some sort of government agency with an official review process for websites
My understanding of the article was that customers complain to their local council, get their money back, and the company changes after loosing too much money.
>it's the job of a consumer to decide if they've been defrauded
The EU doesn't like doing that, there's too many vulnerable people, too much to do in the day for the less vulnerable.
> What if the only way to ban fraud is to say you can't structure it this way? Pyramid schemes seem like a good example.
If it's really the only way, then I can accept that tentatively (without taking an even more radical stance which I won't introduce here). But, I would still say tread very carefully and make sure it's the only way. Government regulation has a tendency to creep up and become entrenched. Even if it is the only way to prevent it, it may not be worth the increased government scope.
> My understanding of the article was that customers complain to their local council, get their money back, and the company changes after loosing too much money.
Okay, sorry I skimmed the article rather briefly. Still, if that's the format, why not keep it in the judicial system? I guess I don't have a strong point there, though.
Unless case law is created in the small claims court, having specific regulations for things which normally end up there is very beneficial for consumers. It gives you a tool to fight the disease - the company committing fraud - rather than treating symptoms by settling in small claims court with anyone who cared enough to bring it there.
For one thing, what is "considered fraud" will be different in each of the 27 member countries of the EU in any area of fraud where national law has not been superseded by a harmonisation directive like this one.
Part of the point of the EU is to have a single market for goods and services. That means I should be able to order something from a Danish company with the same confidence (in a basic level of consumer protection) that I would in my home country, knowing that any caselaw will have been at the CJEU level (because it's interpreting an EU directive) and so will apply EU-wide.
