> Actually the opposite. Government regulations...
I'm from the Netherlands so you won't hear me disagree with the argument that criminalizing cannabis and drugs is not the solution[0].
Having said that, the typical undertone on HN of "regulation is bad by definition" really irks me. I can imagine that if the only perspective one has is a dysfunctional government, one might think that, but please take a look abroad and see how things work over there. Government regulations are a tool that can be used for good and bad.
[0] Also, in the US these laws are historically very much set up to target poor and black people (and I wish I had a clear picture of how things are in my own country regarding that, actually; I'm sure there's a few laws sneakily screwing over migrant workers or something), but I digress.
I think there is a lot of reason to believe that we have a uniquely ineffectual government. Excluding defense expenditures, and counting all levels of government, Canada spends less public money per capita, while having cheaper healthcare, education, better transit, etc. For example, we spend more per capita on education than any OECD country except Switzerland, and get worse results. Our federal system (where states aren’t mere administrative bodies taking direction from the central government) makes things particularly difficult. Which means the aspects of government closest to the people (roads, schools, housing, transit) are often the worst managed.
In at least one case, we have problems in part due to insufficient regulation, rather than excessive regulation. Pharmaceutical companies spend over $5 billion per year on direct-to-consumer advertising in the US; this practice is effectively illegal in Canada, although the regulations surrounding it are poorly enforced.
That $5 billion advertising spend is going to get paid for elsewhere in the health industry ecosystem, and probably several times over once all of the associated costs are considered.
I wonder some days just how much economic damage will have to be done, just how many millions of lives will need to be ruined, before the American public starts to accept that unregulated capitalism is dangerous in almost every market.
I think you are on to something looking at state governments but I don't find the answer completely satisfying because a lot of US States are similarly sized to European countries. Why should we expect the State of NY (~20M people) to have a worse government than the Netherlands (~17M people)? I don't have a great answer to this question.
Perhaps it's just the separation of government in general. People can only pay attention to so much and the attraction of national politics pulls attention away from state politics. That's just not something that happens in many other places.
I never fully realized it until now, but the US, with it's federated structure is putting itself at a competitive disadvantage to other countries.
It's the worst of both worlds, where states have a flaccid independence (they can legislate but not control their borders, thus cannot avoid the free-rider problem). Nation-wide standards that don't fall under the commerce clause have to be bribed into half-ass existence, and then only for a political season.
We're structurally incapable of benefiting from economies of scale or standardization in government.
And what to do about it? Most conservatives want smaller federal government, which reduces the aggregate size and expenditure for government, but exacerbates fragmentation. On the other hand, progressives want larger federal government, which introduces standardizing layers, but spends way more on aggregate government.
I find both of these positions frustratingly vague, and I'm eager to blame them for making the problem appear intractable. They're perfectly intuitive enough to make people have a gut-feeling for what it means without actually thinking about what it means, and in that sense avoid actually debating that, which would be productive.
What does "large" and "small" even mean? Governments are complex social/cultural/legal systems, no matter what the "size". I'm pretty sure waterbed theory applies here[0].
(This is not a critique of your post, but about the US discourse surrounding this in general. At least how it comes across to me as a European)
[0] "the observation, ascribed to Larry Wall, that some systems, such as human and computer languages, contain a minimum amount of complexity, and that attempting to "push down" the complexity of such a system in one place will invariably cause complexity to "pop up" elsewhere.",
I think we're saying the same thing. Small Federal Government either means larger state governments or a whole bunch of undesirable problems like increased pollution, job discrimination, etc, and those issues are not uniformly distributed because of the states.
There is little privatization in the U.S. in the areas I mentioned. For example, less than 10% of Americans go to private or charter schools. In Denmark, Japan, Spain, Korea, and the Netherlands, that number ranges from 20-65%. Few American roads are privately-operated (mostly some turnpikes). In contrast, all of the French autoroute (highway) system is private. Much of Japan's highway and transit system is private too.
Transit is almost entirely publicly owned and operated in the U.S. For example, Amtrak is both owned and operated by the government. In contrast, Deutsche Bahn and Eurostar are are private companies (though subsidized by the government). SNCF, though owned by the government, is run like a private company. E.g. in contrast to Amtrak, where only a single route produces an operating profit, 80% of SNCF's routes produce an operating profit. Japan's key railroads are privatized, and the biggest one (JR East) receives no public subsidy.
Anti-development housing policies that drive up prices are all done by the government (compare to Japan's lax zoning laws).
Healthcare is really the only thing that's more privatized in the U.S. versus other OECD countries, though it's less than you might think. About 50% of healthcare spending in the U.S. comes from direct public money, comparable to Korea, versus 70% in Canada or Spain, and 75-85% in Italy, Germany, France, and the U.K. However, if you account for indirect expenditures (public subsidies for health insurance), the total comes to about 65%, not much less than in Canada or Spain: http://www.pnhp.org/news/2016/january/government-funds-nearl....
And are hardly solely responsible for the opioid crisis as StreamBright suggests. Of course government could have done something to avoid this, however, they'd likely be criticized for putting forth regulations that stifle innovation and hurt businesses. StreamBright's definitely not wrong though that the prohibition of weed has exacerbated the problem.
> Having said that, the typical undertone on HN of "regulation is bad by definition" really irks me.
I think you just notice that undertone more because of your predisposition. I notice just as many pro regulation as anti regulation comments, and I think of myself as a capitalism moderate (since there are negative externalities that do not get included in the price, regulations act as corrective measures to move markets slightly in the direction they would be if those were included correctly, at least when done well).
The empirical evidence speaks in your favor, since I fully expected my remark to be downed, but instead now see a lot of supportive votes.
Mea culpa, I blame negativity bias[0]. US-centric thinking annoys me in a "don't be short-sighted" way (Eurocentric thinking too, but I have more blind spots there), and as a European, the "neutral" position for regulation is probably far more on the regulation side of things (just like how the "neutral" political leaning being very left compared to the US, for that matter).
I also suspect that hathawsh comment elsewhere is right about discourse taking more extreme positions in general, although I doubt the polarization in the US is the lone cause. Stronger opinions are always more vocal, so it is the nature of the internet, and public discourse in general to show apparent extremities within public opinion[1].
> typical undertone on HN of "regulation is bad by definition"
This is pure ancap, "Austrian school" ideology. They define regulation as bad by definition, because supposedly it goes against "freedom". This works as a clutch so that if you say anything bad against capitalism they will retort "it is regulation", even thought nobody ever saw (and never will see) an economic system without laws and regulations.
Well, you can't just blame capitalism for problems happening with government granted monopolies. You must at a minimum get some evidence that it isn't the monopoly causing the problem.
And because modern economies are to a large part composed of government granted monopolies, with almost all problems being in that part¹, nearly all "capitalism is bad" commentary is simply bullshit.
1 - Both governments tend to grant monopolies on problematic areas, and anything that a government grant a monopoly on becomes problematic. So, it can hardly be different.
The BS of this argument is to believe the governments would grant monopolies to random people for no reason. The reason there are monopolies is that capitalists have paid for this privilege, therefore they arise as a result of capital trying to starve competition, as it normally does by several means. The government in this case is simply another tool used by capitalists to keep their privileged position in the markets, not the "source of all evil" as ancaps want naive people to believe. Capitalism and monopolies are just facets of the same thing.
Not really typical, we are very diverse people with very different opinions. What is your argument? Who said government regulations cannot be good and bad? Anything about the subject?
You were responding to someone arguing that this is a byproduct of giving capitalism free, uninhibited reign (paraphrasing). You are arguing that the cause is government regulation, and that this is the opposite.
Apologies for misinterpreting if this was not your intent, but based on what I just wrote, I don't think it's a stretch to interpret that message as implying that regulation is bad in general.
What irks me is how people on the one hand believe that you can't trust companies like Google or Facebook over moderate things, and say "we need federated, decentralized alternatives," and yet when it comes to government (apart from their own pet issues) we magically trust powerful bodies with even less accountability with more important things.
you may be recalling a Hacker News from another era...at this point it is mostly aging software developers bemoaning change and harumphing most everything.
there might be a forum for legitimate hackers who are genuinely stymied by government regulation, but HN isn't it, at least not anymore
YC itself isn't much of a change agent anymore either, it has devolved into a private club for people who won in Silicon Valley
I'm from the Netherlands so you won't hear me disagree with the argument that criminalizing cannabis and drugs is not the solution[0].
Having said that, the typical undertone on HN of "regulation is bad by definition" really irks me. I can imagine that if the only perspective one has is a dysfunctional government, one might think that, but please take a look abroad and see how things work over there. Government regulations are a tool that can be used for good and bad.
[0] Also, in the US these laws are historically very much set up to target poor and black people (and I wish I had a clear picture of how things are in my own country regarding that, actually; I'm sure there's a few laws sneakily screwing over migrant workers or something), but I digress.