this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
735 points (88.4% liked)
Personal Finance
3828 readers
1 users here now
Learn about budgeting, saving, getting out of debt, credit, investing, and retirement planning. Join our community, read the PF Wiki, and get on top of your finances!
Note: This community is not region centric, so if you are posting anything specific to a certain region, kindly specify that in the title (something like [USA], [EU], [AUS] etc.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have rarely seen deregulation where money is to be made working out well for the average person. Feel free to look up the history of the FDA for a taste of what unregulated markets can look like. That said, yes, changing regulations for urban planning will be necessary to have a meaningful impact on the housing problem, and yes, most politicians have very good financial reasons to not let that happen.
You can check deregulation history in Europe and what benefits it brought like cheap and quality flights, cheap and quality railways, etc. I don't know what FDA is, but if something is wrong, then the market is over regulated.
They were the people who said you couldn't sell bread with sawdust in it, or lie about your bread having sawdust in it. Which is what America dealt with before regulations.
Other fun considerations are things like phossy jaw, a fatal condition caused by companies forgoing safety at a cost of 1% of their revenue, until regulations were imposed.
Certainly, there is a such thing as too much regulation, but too little is also demonstrably bad.
Why would anyone buy bread with sawdust? I think the US problem is not the lack of regulation, but that people like shit.
There are three mistakes you're making in those two statements, and an indication that you made a fourth.
What makes you think false advertising or doctoring food with cheap filler is an exclusively American thing? I gave two before, here's another that is both more recent and not in America: Chinese Milk Scandal.
Why would you assume the people buying bread with sawdust knew it had sawdust in it? Do you suppose it was listed in the ingredients, or do you imagine the people who are buying the cheapest bread they can find have the time, means, or knowledge to determine their food is in fact doctored?
You pose questions like it's unlikely that something would ever happen when being provided with knowledge that that thing did in fact happen. At this point I can only assume you're trolling or willfully ignorant.
I mean even without sawdust modern American bread is not really a bread...