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I submit as evidence

a) pretty much every case where a "may issue" permit is required to engage in business (these mostly happen on the state and local level and incentivize corruption).

b) Regulatory capture (e.g. the current FCC).

c) The war on drugs (I can come up with other examples of unnecessarily criminalizing things if needed).

And on the other side, the movies/music/video games/tv rating system sure isn't perfect but it's a great example of an industry coming up with a solution that doesn't involve regulation. Various other professional organizations (ones that are not given special protection via legislation, i.e. not doctors and lawyers) are also good examples. The AWS comes to mind as a pretty good one.

Legislation is hard to get right and harder to change and I'd rather only use it when other options have been exhausted (e.g. I support making ISPs utilities and a public option for healthcare).

Personally I find the knee jerk reaction to legislate whenever anything bad happens quite dogmatic.



"Regulating whenever something bad happens" is problematic, but it's a bit of a straw man. You should be regulating wherever people are incentivized to do bad things, which happens quite often when you don't offer any oversight whatsoever. Especially when you are unwilling to even regulate the reporting of misbehavior.


>but it's a bit of a straw man.

Knee jerk legislation is not a straw man. It happens all the time. The CFAA is a knee-jerk law. Here[1] is a more recent example.

[1]https://abcnews.go.com/US/ny-gov-andrew-cuomo-bans-stretch-l...

And the last paragraph of the article mentions banning long vehicles, which itself is a knee jerk response to when a drunk t-boned a limo on Long Island awhile back.

I agree about regulating incentives though.


c) The war on drugs (I can come up with other examples of unnecessarily criminalizing things if needed).

You're conflating actual criminal law with regulations in order to make your argument.

I think that's intelectually dishonest.

edit : spello




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