Subject:
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Re: Nuke Boston (was Re: Resolved: Tall SUVs should not be...)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sat, 23 Sep 2000 05:54:33 GMT
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Viewed:
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608 times
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Dave Schuler wrote:
> > Why, if these are good ideas, is it necessary for there to be regulation? And
> > if they're not actually good ideas, why is it a good thing that they are
> > mandated just the same? c.f. regulation of how much bone slivers can be
> > present in my hot dogs. Absent that regulation, meat companies would compete
> > on how little they had, or not having any at all, but now that we have a
> > minimum standard, they all don't bother to mention how much is in there any
> > more. Regulated standards ensure mediocrity because no one tries to exceed
> > them, there's no market advantage in doing so.
>
> If you'd add onto this a policy of full disclosure, I think I'd agree here.
> My concern is that there could easily be a practice of rug-sweeping, under
> which companies do whatever they feel like doing, all the while spinning and
> respinning other companies' accustations re: food content. With the presence
> of regulatory agencies (which could, I admit, have analogies in privatized
> watchdog organizations), food vendors are at least forced to adhere to
> standardized rules, and corporate spin therefore carries (at present) less
> weight.
And we do have watchdog organizations, which are often more effective
than the government (though sometimes they are wrong) just because they
answer only to the consumer (or at least far more so than the government
which also answers to big [and small] business).
Now here's a little trivia: is that "UL Approved" label something
regulated by the government?
As far as regulation and watch dogging and all. Remember, the government
is just a group of people, who are presumably influenced by their
constituents. Ultimately, government can only do what a significant
number of people want done. So, if thing XYZ really is dangerous, and
should be regulated, if we couldn't influence the government to regulate
it (because the government keeps it's nose out of that quagmire), all we
need to do is convince a group of people who have a certain level of
power that thing XYZ is dangerous, and could they do something to make
that danger known, and make sure the maker/user/doer of thing XYZ is
properly held responsible. That could be as simple as getting the
newspaper to publish an expose (you can bet that now that the Firestone
business is front page news that they are working a LOT faster to deal
with the problem than they were last year).
In fact, the government really only has the power to do that which we
have given the government the power to do (note that this is not
necessarily true for all governments, and not 100.0000000% true of ours,
there is a small bit of power that our government has, which was granted
by a fairly small number of people, but they made sure that they were
limiting that power, and in fact, considered those limits so important,
that they immediately enumerated a bunch of limitations). Our government
sticks its nose into things it shouldn't because we as a collective have
acquiesced to it.
This little detail of how the government is why the right to bear arms
is so important. Not because we ever really believe that we will need to
take up arms against our government, but that by holding that power to
ourselves as individuals, we demonstrate our freedom. The fact that we
TRUST the individual (in a general sense - obviously the founding
fathers couldn't have believed that certain people should not NOT be
trusted with a gun) in this sense demonstrates that we do trust each
other to generally "do the right thing".
What this comes down to is that really the reason we probably should not
include strategic nukes in that category of things we trust individuals
with is not that we shouldn't in general trust the individual, but that
the damage if we are wrong creates a risk much greater than the slight
risk in granting the government control of nukes. I.e. letting the
government control the nukes puts us at far far less risk of nuclear
annihilation than the risk of some bozo stealing (or having enough money
to buy - I think I made a joke the last time the issue of personal
ownership of nukes came up about Bill Gates launching one) a nuke and
deciding he's going to get back at his ex-wife for leaving him (and all
those other a------ who happen to live in the same geographical area she
does and obviously are ganging up with her against him).
Frank
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