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When I hear people talk about deregulation, what I'm really hearing them say is: "any limitation on harming people is a limitation on profits".

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I like to use braking (before anti-lock brakes) as an analogy to regulation. Brake too little and you hit a tree. Break too hard and you hit a tree. The trick is to find the sweet spot. The current voices for deregulation just want to make sure the car explodes when it hits the tree.

the problem, regulation can also do those things. like, I can have a regulation that says I must spray chemicals into a place. the reality, you need to have more common sense then to be caught by buzz words.

Yeah, regulation is a choice. It’s balancing pure profit driving decisions against stifling of new innovation. Each countries seems to have a different tolerance for it.

There are definitely cases where a legitimate argument exists that regulatory capture has made incumbents unreasonably difficult or impossible to compete with by increasing compliance burden in ways that disadvantage smaller players… but yeah.

It’s mostly true that there’s a trade off between regulation and profits. People on the left too often fall into the trap of viewing profits as something only the wealthy are concerned with rather than synonymous with economic growth. There is no substitute to analyzing individual regulations.

Yes and, allow corps to do anything that results in turing a dollar. That said, deregulation is a necessary evil and important part of the capitalist system but historically it gets abused.

Yep. But part of the problem is that protecting the system from unchecked capitalism tends to also prevent much-needed, but very difficult reform.

The problem with regulation is also that stuff like regulatory capture ultimately defeats the trust in regulators, so then it becomes muddled whether healthcare is actually healthcare or not. The overall tradeoff with regulation is that it in itself can be profit seeking

Deregulating auto-sales to not require dealership middle men would be a nice thing, would dry up a massive source of almost entirely right-wing funding wealth.

But that’s a very specific kind of regulation written by members of an industry to protect that industry rather than written to protect the public good. What we should do is go back and look at every regulation the Chamber of Commerce ever spoke kindly about and consider tearing those away.

Profit at any cost. Literally the only metric we use to measure public companies. People work to the metrics to which they’re expected to adhere. When the profit metric starts to go in the wrong direction or isn’t going up fast enough, panic sets in.

Pretty much. Sawdust in the bread, chalk in the milk, carcinogens in the air and the water, and you get thrown in the trash the moment you're crippled because your employer couldn't be bothered to observe minimal safety standards. We've seen it before. Looks like we get to fight it all again.

Where I get stuck discussing this, and trying to advocate for the long view, they brush off that potential future harm as a "stimulus for innovation". It's this infallible belief unbridled capitalism to solve the problems of unbridled capitalism.

I often ask myself, why do we allow this to happen, and the only thing I can come up with is how deeply entangled people are with those profits. Everything from the stock market to people's hope for a better future is tied to those profits, and now money rules the world.

Not looking to start an argument, just provide a different perspective: I am pro-deregulation because, from what I can see, regulation usually serves to preserve the power of union officials and incumbent companies.

Regulation makes it harder for new companies to enter the market, which lowers competition, and therefore product quality, and gives workers fewer alternate options for better employment.

Consevatives have used the phrase "job killing regulations" for years. But most regulations are written in blood. Someone died and they made a rule so it doesn't happen again. Can we start saying "life saving regulations" ?

I always tell people who ask “why do we have to do this?” that building codes/OSHA regs (at the very least) are written in the blood of people killed or injured because someone cut a corner to make a little more profit.

Plenty of regulation exists only to protect profits. For example broadband sūcks in so many places thanks to Republican legislation protecting Big Cable oligopoly. Or the US ports which are the most expensive and inefficient in the world thanks to regulations forced by longshoremen and the mob.

The flip side is leading companies in a market asking for regulations so that it increases the hurdles to new players challenging their dominance. Some (not all) regulations exist only to harm profits to enable monopolies