Democracy

Stavros, you seem to have moved from an outright denial that such micro-management exists to the claim that it's okay because it's justified by the precautionary principle. Which is the usual justification for such interference. I've read the story to which you link. The restaurant in question was presumably already regulated, so the story is not exactly a poster child for the efficacity of regulation. Of course the same might be said had there been a free market in this restaurant's products (which is arguably irrelevant under the circumstances): as you say, and as I have already said on this thread, its self interest lies in best-serving its customers, giving them the best food it can without poisoning them. Given the nature of the product, in a free market, it might have explicitly warned customers that making the food taste as good as possible in some cases ran the risk of food poisoning, and customers could make their choice as they saw fit. Few would, I imagine take up the offer, but at least it would be there. Now, in one tiny way, to add to all the other tiny ways in which regulation stifles our lives, customers at this restaurant have had that choice removed from them. Nanny knows best. Apparently that proposition doesn't bother you. But I consider myself an adult, and I can make my own decisions about what suits me.

None of this dispensation existed under mediaeval monarchs, whose bureaucracies, whose ability to gather information and act on it, were minute and trivial compared to those of today.

I agree that serfdom was a moral and economic fact of life, but then so is the fact that we work for the government for about half the year (more or less, depending where you live). The distinction is one of like, not one of kind. You refer to the fact that under feudalism, property was (usually) held on sufferance. I would argue that nowadays the concept of property in the western world has been so debased by the terms on which it is held - that boiler you aren't allowed to decide where to locate, for instance, as to be meaningless. Eminent domain, in the US, is another example. Granted, life in the mediaeval era was nastier, more brutish and shorter than it is now, but then again the intervening period of the industrial revolution, as well as medical advances reducing child mortality rates, explain that difference.

As to comparing rates of taxation then and now, you say that "To compare the rate of taxation in the 14th century to what we pay today is meaningless without the context." But that makes my point for me: the context then was of a stunted government which, outside the ambit of the feudal settlement into which most people were born, had no impact on how they lit their mud hits, or where they located their fires within those mud huts, etc. The context now, by contrast, is of a much greater tax take which contributes to funding the micro-management of precisely those things (or their modern equivalent). We are better off, but in many respects less free. And we can be conscripted for military service.

Btw, who's this "William Shakespeare, a poet and playwright" of whom you speak?

What would happen should a genius withdraw his work from the world:

Einstein is celebrated for his special and general theories of relativity. The special theory, published in 1905, rectified an inconsistency thought to reside within Maxwell’s theory of electrodynamics, published in 1861. Up until 1861 is was thought that all the laws of physics should be invariant under Galilean transformations (i.e. that the laws are the same for any two observers in uniform motion relative to an inertial frame of reference). Maxwell’s equations however are not symmetric with respect to Galilean transformations, indeed they predict the constancy of the speed of light from one inertial frame to another. Lorentz worked on this problem from 1892 to 1904, though it was Poincare who noticed that buried in Lorentz’s attempts to come to terms with Maxwell there was an amazing symmetry in Maxwell’s theory: the Maxwell equations are invariant under Lorentz transformations. It was Poincare who first questioned the classical notions of simultaneity, the existence of ether and gave voice to his suspicion that the classical theory of relativity may have to be modified; i.e. that the laws of physics should display a general covariance (or symmetry) with respect to a set of transformations, but that class of transformations may not be Galilean. It was Einstein in 1905 who put two and two together and made the celebrated claim that the laws of physics must be invariant under Lorentz transformations. A great number of troubling conflicts were resolved. Einstein is celebrated for his bravery because a great number of common sense notions (consequences of our everyday familiarity with the Galilean way of thinking) had to be abandoned or revised; i.e. because physics is symmetric with respect to Lorentz transformations rather than Galilean transformations length contracts, time dilates and energy adds to mass with uniform motion. No doubt Einstein was a genius, but did it take a genius to invent special relativity in 1905. Most historians of science and most scientists think not. The theory was ripe for the picking. If not Einstein, then Lorentz, or Poincare, or Weyl or Hilbert would have found it.

But the special theory had its own special troubles. It was unclear just what made one frame of reference inertial another not. Clearly there was a more general symmetry__a bigger broader set of transformations under which the laws of physics were covariant__a more general symmetry which included the Lorentz symmetry as a special case__there had to be a general theory of relativity. Einstein worked on the general theory for more than a decade, publishing a number of false starts and retracting them. In 1915 Einstein gave some lectures in Gottingen on his work in progress. David Hilbert was in attendance. Einstein explained his problem. Einstein conjecture the laws of physics are covariant under all diffeomorphisms of spacetime, but if that were so gravitational forces would have to be reducible (at least locally) to the fictitious inertial forces associated with accelerated frames of reference. The problem then is to write down a set of field equations that connect metric of spacetime to the distribution of matter and energy within. Hilbert thought about it a few months later and wrote down the equations which we now call the Einstein field equations. Einstein published them first, but Hilbert’s derivation of them is not only original but entirely unique. So had Einstein not discovered general relativity, Hilbert certainly would have.

Einstein was also one of the early founders of quantum mechanics. His published his quantum interpretation of the photoelectric effect in 1905, the same year he published his special theory of relativity. But quantum mechanics defied Einstein’s classical grasp of physical theory. He wrestled with it’s dualities and argued with it’s proponents. Even though Einstein lived and worked into old age he effectively withdrew from work on quantum theory. As a critic he is partly responsible for inventing EPR paradox, but his “realist” interpretation failed. The effective withdrawal of his genius from the field did nothing to slow the growth of quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics etc. etc.

Nice post, Trish. Enjoyed the historical perspective on physics evolution and it's theoreticians.

Actually, I'm enjoying all the posts in this thread. And although I find myself mostly on the opposite side of an8150's views of social democracy, I do find his/her arguments to be well stated, and he/she doesn't resort to the worst rhetorical gimmicks such as constantly moving the goalposts.

It's much easier to agree to disagree with someone who doesn't approach debate from a position of disrespect of one's opponent, and who is willing to concede a point or two on occasion.

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Originally Posted by an8150

Stavros, you seem to have moved from an outright denial that such micro-management exists to the claim that it's okay because it's justified by the precautionary principle. Which is the usual justification for such interference. I've read the story to which you link. The restaurant in question was presumably already regulated, so the story is not exactly a poster child for the efficacity of regulation. Of course the same might be said had there been a free market in this restaurant's products (which is arguably irrelevant under the circumstances): as you say, and as I have already said on this thread, its self interest lies in best-serving its customers, giving them the best food it can without poisoning them. Given the nature of the product, in a free market, it might have explicitly warned customers that making the food taste as good as possible in some cases ran the risk of food poisoning, and customers could make their choice as they saw fit.

Btw, who's this "William Shakespeare, a poet and playwright" of whom you speak?

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An8150,
What you say about the restaurant's incentives is a gross simplification and not I think consistent with reality. A restaurant is incentivized to make as much money as possible without subjecting itself to a lawsuit. This does not necessarily lead to the safest product possible, but the largest bottom line. As a result, a restaurant will think about the cost of taking certain precautions, the likelihood that lax food safety practices will result in food poisoning, the likelihood that if someone suffers food poisoning it's traced back to them, and the ensuing harm to their business as a result. People tend to undervalue those risks that result in longer term (and uncertain) harm and over-value the front-loaded benefits that would result from saving money based on an absence of safety requirements.

They might also be emboldened by the fact that there is nobody to detect lax food sanitation practices. Food sanitation is related to but not the same as food safety. For instance, perfectly harmless components, such as ground-up insects and rodent hairs make it into our food supply everyday. People may not get sick from such adulteration but it is unsavory.

A restaurant would have very little incentive to keep out such filth since these non-pathogenic contaminants would probably go unnoticed by the average consumer. You might argue that eating cockroaches is okay as long as you don't get sick or don't know about it....in which case I'd love to hear the argument.

By not encouraging compliance with regulatory standards and not managing the processes by which safety is maintained you tempt fate. Bad food sanitation leads to unsafe food in the long run. It also does not help if the detection comes too late and a restauranteur is insolvent.

Anyhow, by allowing the market to self-regulate you are promoting a policy that is reactive rather than proactive. When it comes to public health and disease transmission this is particularly dangerous. It is cavalier to leave food safety to individual proprietor's estimations as to how many potential patrons they'd alienate per case of E. Coli.

broncofan, "What you say about the restaurant's incentives is a gross simplification and not I think consistent with reality. A restaurant is incentivized to make as much money as possible without subjecting itself to a lawsuit [correct, and the question for it, as for any business, is whether it seeks to maximise its revenue in the short-term come what may, or build goodwill over the longer term even at the expense of short-term gain; a restaurannt such as Raymond Blanc's would easily survive the fallout from the story to which Stavros links, because Blanc has a 35 or so year global reputation; a start-up would be less fortunate]. This does not necessarily lead to the safest product possible [careful, the safest product is not necessarily the best product, the best product is in the eye of the beholder], but the largest bottom line. As a result, a restaurant will think about the cost of taking certain precautions, the likelihood that lax food safety practices will result in food poisoning, the likelihood that if someone suffers food poisoning it's traced back to them, and the ensuing harm to their business as a result. People tend to undervalue those risks that result in longer term (and uncertain) harm and over-value the front-loaded benefits that would result from saving money based on an absence of safety requirements [and those are the restaurants, in a free market, most likely to fail, because they do not appreciate that goodwill comprises a million tiny things that can see you through bad publicity or a recession; I'm all in favour of failure, just as I love to see success].

They might also be emboldened by the fact that there is nobody to detect lax food sanitation practices. Food sanitation is related to but not the same as food safety. For instance, perfectly harmless components, such as ground-up insects and rodent hairs make it into our food supply everyday. People may not get sick from such adulteration but it is unsavory.

A restaurant would have very little incentive to keep out such filth since these non-pathogenic contaminants would probably go unnoticed by the average consumer. You might argue that eating cockroaches is okay as long as you don't get sick or don't know about it....in which case I'd love to hear the argument. [well now! what if I told you that I happened to know that food eaten by you in 50 of the restaurants you've eaten in in the last three years contained traces both of human faecal matter and ground-up insects? Humour me, set aside the fact that we don't know each other. The point is, I may even be right, and neither of us in fact will ever know. Plenty of things are unsavoury. The unclean hand you have to shake. The door handle used by 5,000 other people today. The bus seat formerly occupied by more urine-stained rough sleepers than you can shake a stick at. Even if such things, including unsavoury food in a restaurant, could be prevented by regulation and the precautionary principle (and currently they cannot, they are merely disincentivised) the only point would be a technical one, namely that we would be protected from something unsavoury that we didn't know about. Now, I don't dispute that any industry will have its sharp practitioners. I don't even say that in a free market the market will always find them out, although I think consumers applying their own self-interest to, say, restaurants, will probably do a better job than bureaucrats because the range of information and experiences available to the generality of, say, a restaurant's customers is fuller than that available to food safety bureaucrats, but I do say that the exercise in rational self-interest by a restaurant owner is certainly complex, but less cynically so than you've described. Many people, after all, take pride in their work. In the Raymond Blanc restaurant story, one of the striking aspects is that the restaurant, rather than supply the food as required by the food standards bureaucrats, has withdrawn it from sale because, served as required by the food standards bureaucrats, in the view of the restaurant's owners it's not tasty. In a sense, they are unrepentant, rather joyously so. In any event, is the prevention of that which is unsavoury now part of the remit of the precautionary principle? because if so, micro-regulation is going to get a lot more restrictive].

By not encouraging compliance with regulatory standards and not managing the processes by which safety is maintained you tempt fate [in fact regulation often encourages a "race to the bottom" among providers, because compliance with the basic legal requirement locks out new competitors and, after all, if you can say 'government approved' without doing any more, where is the incentive to do any better?]. Bad food sanitation leads to unsafe food in the long run. It also does not help if the detection comes too late and a restauranteur is insolvent [that's at least no more or less likely than with self-regulation in a free market].

Anyhow, by allowing the market to self-regulate you are promoting a policy that is reactive rather than proactive [it's pro-active in the sense I've described above, re. goodwill and the range of information available to customers, it's just that there are no official records, under that scenario, of how it's pro-active]. When it comes to public health and disease transmission this is particularly dangerous. It is cavalier to leave food safety to individual proprietor's estimations as to how many potential patrons they'd alienate per case of E. Coli."

[QUOTE=an8150;1235916]
Stavros, you seem to have moved from an outright denial that such micro-management exists to the claim that it's okay because it's justified by the precautionary principle.
-Precautionary measures do not constitute micro-management; your argument is that we are more micro-managed and taxed than ever before in history, my response has been to dispute that this is true. That we may be more subject to surveillance, through closed-circuit tv cameras on our streets, I think that is probably true.

The restaurant in question was presumably already regulated, so the story is not exactly a poster child for the efficacity of regulation.
-But that is not the point -I raised it because it exposed the difficulty of your hostility to 'micro-management' on a health issue where I assume your judgement would be that threats to health should be removed wherever possible. It is actually a difficult case because I assume many people have eaten that liver dish without falling ill and it is the kind of dish you would expect a Michelin-starred chef (albeit that particular Brasserie doesn't have such a star) to have tested many times. So its not about the efficacy of regulation, but the authorites responding to an issue as it arises, which is what they are there for. I agree that in a 'free market', whatever that means, the Brasserie, noting that several people have died/fallen ill after eating the dish would withdraw it from the menu (well, we assume this), but what you have to establish is that the population does not want their food industry regulated in this way, and that I am not sure of. In other words, there may be issues, public health being one of them, where the public actually wants regulations enforced, not withdrawn.

None of this dispensation existed under mediaeval monarchs, whose bureaucracies, whose ability to gather information and act on it, were minute and trivial compared to those of today.

I agree that serfdom was a moral and economic fact of life, but then so is the fact that we work for the government for about half the year (more or less, depending where you live). The distinction is one of like, not one of kind. You refer to the fact that under feudalism, property was (usually) held on sufferance. I would argue that nowadays the concept of property in the western world has been so debased by the terms on which it is held - that boiler you aren't allowed to decide where to locate, for instance, as to be meaningless. Eminent domain, in the US, is another example. Granted, life in the mediaeval era was nastier, more brutish and shorter than it is now, but then again the intervening period of the industrial revolution, as well as medical advances reducing child mortality rates, explain that difference.

As to comparing rates of taxation then and now, you say that "To compare the rate of taxation in the 14th century to what we pay today is meaningless without the context." But that makes my point for me: the context then was of a stunted government which, outside the ambit of the feudal settlement into which most people were born, had no impact on how they lit their mud hits, or where they located their fires within those mud huts, etc. The context now, by contrast, is of a much greater tax take which contributes to funding the micro-management of precisely those things (or their modern equivalent). We are better off, but in many respects less free. And we can be conscripted for military service.

Your attempt to defend your earlier claim that taxes in medieval England were a tiny proportion of what we pay now has not been advanced with any evidence; if we can agree that when a man and all he produces belongs to the noble Lord, and that constitues 100% of what he makes, it is hard to pay more in tax on top of that. But what seems obvious is that the complete absence of freedom itself seems to be a 'mere detail' to you, and because the serf is 'free to choose' where to put a fire in his hut maybe that 100% is wrong. Should we re-calibrate the man's freedom and grant him 1% of freedom to choose where to put the fire, leaving us with a figure of 99% paid in taxes, could it be 0.5% after all its only a fire -? This is sophistry, not history. You might as well claim that cotton pickin' slaves from the ole South had free accommodation, so what were they complaining about?

The problem is induced by the link you make between taxes and freedom in late capitalism, integral to the arguments of Hayek, to take one well-known example. The comparison with medieval England is not going to work because the context is different, the concept of freedom itself has changed from what it was at that time, in addition to which the powers that local barons and the Kings had have changed, as indeed have the powers of the Church and the Parish Council in which you once would have lived.

Your argument has not changed since Mrs Thatcher raised it in the 1970s, and that is based on the argument that people should pay less in tax so that they can decide what to do with the money they earn, rather than have the government decide for them, and on some issues she was right, and taxes were reduced, and she won four elections in a row on that basis. You will also note that not only did the richest people benefit most from her tax regime, her government reduced personal income tax, but then increased secondary taxation with increases on VAT, alcohol, petrol and tobacco, to take just four typical taxes, thereby increasing the tax burden in aggregate terms. Over the lifetime of the Thacher government the UK's maufacturing capacity was reduced by 25%, and the rise in unemployment that followed was paid for from the profits of North Sea oil. The privatisation of the railways has resulted in this 'privately run' industry now absorbing more public money in subsidy than was paid to British Rail as it was at the time, and the fare structure has become a labyrinth of charges few can understand; the costs of running a car/vehicle have increased, for private users and say, haulage businesses; it costs a lot more to smoke yourself into a hospital bed or the grave; and 20 odd years on from the privatisation of the gas industry, we are paying more for gas, with evidence that the 'free market' has led to gas companies fixing prices regardless of it, so that it is a case of 'free to fix' rather than 'free to choose'; and I had the benefit of a free university education but the current generation is expected to create a debt burden -their own private tax- before they have even graduated. Is this freedom?

The evidence we have suggests that the most libertarian government we have had in the UK in the 20th century, and its like-minded successors, did not reduce the tax burden, did not remove government subsidy from industry, and has not made the country safe from attack.

As I have said before, I think most people in this country do not object to paying taxes when the system is transparent and fair, and they can see that the money is indeed being spent on our defence, our health and education and the other uses to which taxes should be put; it is morally the right thing to do, because we all live here and share this island and its resources. These are all issues that can be, and are put to the public vote; if you think we should leave the European Union, NATO and 'go it alone' then you have the opportunity every day to campaign for it, and then ask yourself why nobody votes for it (because it would raise our taxes!) -being a sore loser doesn't win many votes.

Can't subject public safety to cost/benefit analysis. They have nothing to do with each other. Y'all've gotten off the subject of markets now, & moved into the realm of negligence. People shouldn't have to wait for the "market" to catch up with reality. If a business puts the public at risk, regardless of fault, they need to be shut immediately, until the problem gets fixed or they're gone. If someone knowingly puts people at risk for personal gain (cost benefit analysis), it's criminal. Nobody should have to put up with that kind of crap. People trump property. Always.

This is just one example of the many many many reasons that egoism can't work in the real world. It's just a pipe dream, based on a half baked crackpot theory.

an8150 said: "and those are the restaurants, in a free market, most likely to fail, because they do not appreciate that goodwill comprises a million tiny things that can see you through bad publicity or a recession; I'm all in favour of failure, just as I love to see success]."


I often have not followed up on your response because we are both offering our points of view and on questions such as this it doesn't help for me to retort by saying, "nu-uh" like a six year old kid. So I won't say nu-uh, but I don't think you're right.

You think companies would have the incentive to focus on the process by which disease is prevented, something seen as unnecessarily cumbersome by the regulated industries? People learn the hard way. Some businesses fail. On the other hand, some that institute bad policies either do not fail in the short run or do not fail at all.

Even if we were in agreement about what the incentives are, which we are not, there would also be the issue of people not responding as sensitively to the incentives that exist.

The market might respond by turning someone's Botulism dispensing factory into a failure, but the point is not to punish someone who has caused death and misery after the fact. I am sure the market's response would be enough to prevent that person from spreading disease but unfortunately people don't learn from the mistakes and failures of others so well as their own. As you point out the market does eventually prevent bad actors from staying in business, but I am skeptical that this would keep others from cropping up.

The Food and Drug Administration's thorough drug testing policy is one of the best examples I can think of of a cumbersome but necessary regulatory requirement. Quackery abounds in the field of medicine and the placebo effect is a tremendously powerful psychological force. People cannot tell on their own what is efficacious or not and individuals do not always notice when drugs cause insidious problems. Why does the FDA not approve drugs that are safe but ineffective? Because there is an opportunity cost for not getting appropriate treatment for serious illness.

Without stringent regulation of drugs, you would have poorly capitalized companies pitching products with unsupported claims, waiting until the evidence accumulated to sue them. Again, you might say how do you know that. The businesses have an incentive to not harm their image. But when you're dealing with hucksters, the corporate image is harmed in the long-term, IF they're discovered to be charlatans, but the profits accrue in the short-term. Don't they want the public's goodwill? That's what it will require to be a successful company over significant periods of time, but as John Maynard Keynes famously said "in the long-run we're all dead". Why shorten the cycle?

"[it's pro-active in the sense I've described above, re. goodwill and the range of information available to customers, it's just that there are no official records, under that scenario, of how it's pro-active]."

Yes, but you already said you are depending upon failure as a regulatory mechanism. I haven't summed my views enough and instead have tried to be too rhetorical so this is as reductive as I can get.

The incentives for businesses don't lead inexorably to caution.

When the incentives should lead to caution, such incentives are not always heeded.

The public is neither always informed nor always rational.

When businesses fail because they have been unsafe, this a small success propped on top of a giant failure. It is a reaction to something that could have been prevented.

Too many permutations here but none of them work out for you. The public is better at identifying failure than regulators? The public is diffuse, regulators use sophisticated equipment and develop an expertise in identifying and quantifying tolerance levels for risk. The public is comprised of people who not only don't know the full scope of the risks but do not have the capacity to understand the full nature of the risks. Or we could say, they're distracted. It is very difficult to think about in rational terms when you are thinking about getting the cheapest product. As Hippifried said, this cost/benefit analysis could get absurd and miss the point. The public might be acting "rationally" by buying a tube of toothpaste that is a dollar cheaper but more likely to cause cancer. You would probably say that by preventing them from making this awful choice, I am being paternalistic. But do you really hate your father that much that you'd encourage cancer just to spite him? Shame shame.

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You would probably say that by preventing them from making this awful choice, I am being paternalistic. But do you really hate your father that much that you'd encourage cancer just to spite him? Shame shame.

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Freud would be so proud.