Let's go back to using leaded gasoline then, shall we?
And we should remove all nutritional labels from food packaging.
Safety ratings for automobiles are clearly a waste of time and are holding back innovation.
Restaurant health inspections, also useless.
And I'm sure building codes have nothing to do with the fact the we don't really have earthquake deaths in the U.S. anymore.
And so on...
Of course, not all regulation is effective, and some probably ends up doing more harm than good. But we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
We should abolish mandates requiring nutritional labeling, safety ratings for cars (carmakers far exceed government safety requirements anyway, because it's good for business), restaurant health inspections, and building codes.
That is not to say we shouldn't have nutritional labeling, safety standards, and restaurant inspections. But it should be voluntary, in response to consumer demand for certified safety and quality.
Apple didn't become the largest company in the world by producing shoddy products. The market rewards a reputation for quality. In other words, society evolves toward safer and better quality products over time, whether it's through government mandates or simply changing consumer preferences and increasing consumer awareness.
I would argue that the agricultural and food safety regulations have contributed to the modern industrial agro-business model, because they are naturally geared toward more centralized operations. Small farms that slaughter and butcher animals on the premises for example face significant hurdles due to agriculture regulations. Cookie cutter solutions mandated by the government kill diversity and encourage consolidation and centralisation.
The government can play an active and positive role, by creating voluntary opt-in certification programs, that act as market signals for quality. For example, it can create a voluntary food safety certification that participating companies that meet its requirements can advertise with a seal on their products.
The government can fund public information resources to better inform consumers of the options available on the market and how they compare in quality and risks.
I am not arguing against a government role in the economy. I'm only arguing against mandating a cookie cutter solution that abridges the right of an individual to decide for themselves what risks to incur.
The idea of government actively facilitating a diversity of optional or also private regulatory paradigms is interesting. I imagine there are definite benefits that could result from pursuing ideas like that.
I do worry about the ability or desire of most individuals to analyze and differentiate between such options, especially in cases with high complexity.
For many individuals, even with determined efforts to increase awareness and to educate, it is simply too difficult or time consuming to meaningfully learn if such and such product is actually safe. As technology advances, this dynamic will likely become more magnified. It is fantasy to expect an average individual to be able to determine if an arbitrary safety rating of a self-driving vehicle is trustworthy, for example.
I wouldn't argue that many of our current approaches to regulation are optimal in the slightest. However, I would argue that complexity is increasing faster than our ability to manage it. To me, this implies that we have to make tough trade-offs at times, perhaps accepting some slowdown in growth, in order to not shoot ourselves in the foot.
Perhaps one improvement we could strive towards even now is some sort of entrenched mechanism that would force serious re-evaluation of each regulatory paradigm every so often (perhaps once a decade or so), in order to prevent stagnation and ensure new learnings are incorporated.
I'm not sure how such a thing could be implemented, but anything that moves us closer to internalizing an awareness of current imperfections and the never-ceasing opportunity to make incremental as well fundamental improvements, I think we would reap great benefits over the long term.
With respect to complexity: the world is filled with complex services where a purchase is a bet on outcomes that will unfold over many years. This myth that people cannot organise themselves to procure complicated products/services without mandates, price controls, central economic planning, etc to best serve their own needs is outdated and needs to be put to rest.
People in a complex economy delegate analysis and assessment of complexity to others, and this happens whether the delegation is mandated by a government regulation, or a result of voluntary decisions. To go back to my Apple example, the reason the typical consumer came to believe Apple products are long-lasting and well-made, and that Apple provides high quality support, is not because they personally interviewed everyone who's ever owned an Apple product. It's because public knowledge, like Wikipedia, or the reputations attached to particular products or companies, is a product of millions of minds, finding and filtering out information to produce an accurate picture of the world that can easily be digested by a typical person. It's a spontaneous bottom-up process that trumps anything that could you created by centralized committee.
I think the most regulatory restriction that can be justified is labeling restrictions that codify common law. For example, if a court finds that a particular kind of advertisement claim is misleading, it would be useful to make a law stating any claim that follows this pattern is illegal, and for government officials to police commercial communications and punish parties making such claims.
Beyond that though, I don't believe the complexity of our modern world can be addressed by mandatory solutions imposed by central committees. I think there's a very high cost attached to the centralized regulatory approach. For example, consider how much less health care spending may have increased if decentralized bottom-up processes predominated, instead of top-down organization:
http://healthblog.ncpa.org/why-cant-the-market-for-medical-c...
