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.
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?
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.
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.
It also assumes it is immediately deadly poison, and doesn’t do something like cause early dementia 25 years later.
Regulations are written in blood
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.
its solved by getting money out of politics, along with removing regulations that don’t make sense and keeping the ones that do
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.
