Less government/regulation is good if and only if the underlying market is highly competitive. High competition protects consumers. Examples: restaurants, barbers, tailors, spas, almost anywhere small businesses exist. All ancient, well-functioning industries that are comparatively minimally regulated.
The problem with deregulating banks is that the banking industry is low-competition. A few corporations dominate the landscape. So deregulation just strengthens the predators.
All deregulation should be accompanied by an equal effort to foster a massive amount of competition within the industry. Otherwise, things can go south rather quickly.
But that's not a natural state of affairs. Look at the savings and loan scandal! Without the regulation, banking was intensely competitive. Why assume that, if you took the regulation away, banking would take no notice and stay exactly the same?
> All deregulation should be accompanied by an equal effort to foster a massive amount of competition within the industry.
Deregulation is an effort to foster competition within the deregulated industry. Those regulations are barriers to entry, which is why large companies always want more of them.
With airplanes, you have not only the risk to paying customers, but to bystanders who in many cases cannot be made whole in the event of an accident (i.e., you might get a financial settlement if an airplane crashes into your house, but that won’t bring your family members who were in the house back to life.)
I’m all for cutting superfluous government regulation, but deregulating airline safety is quite possibly the dumbest possible place to do it.
But you could also argue the airline industry is fairly concentrated. There are only so many airlines. If a Delta flight crashes, you might still fly Delta again in the future, because there are only so many options.
Now imagine if there were as many airlines as restaurants. If one Delta flight messes up in any way, people would never fly them again. They'd go out of business.
Of course, a market with as many airlines as restaurants isn't practical in the current day (maybe when AI robots become feasible). Hence, agree that airline regulations are necessary.
There are a number of smaller airlines competing with the big players but they have limited route networks and little opportunity to expand.
That's great and everything, but I don't see what it has to do with what I wrote: even given infinite competition, the risk to the public from an improperly managed airline is great. If an airplane fell out of the sky onto my house, I'd be glad for them to go out of business, but that wouldn't fix my house or heal or revive the people inside the house.
There is simply no amount of competition that would change that dynamic. The concepts are orthogonal.
I don't work in the airline industry, but my father in law did. He was a large jet mechanic. He constantly told stories of airline managers pressuring mechanics (and inspectors) to sign off on returning airplanes to service that were not airworthy, at least by regulation. Some gizmo or another would be broken and it just wouldn't seem like it should be such a big deal. We need this plane back in the air. What's taking you so long?
Competition doesn't make those people go away. If anything, more competition would make those kinds of people more likely to be upset over a plane not generating revenue over what (to them) seems like a minor problem.
Regulation is what keeps those people in check. Today, the airline can't overrule the licensed mechanic or inspector. The licensed expert has to personally sign off that needed repairs are performed and performed correctly, not the idiot who just doesn't understand what the big deal is.
Analogies like these usually deviate from actual reality. Numerous restaurants have had E.Coli outbreaks, sometimes fatal. And yet they remain in business. Thriving, even. Memories are short and people generally believe bad things only happen to other people.
We need regulation because people are not fundamentally "good", even if they mean well. I'm glad you're "half-libertarian" because you are halfway there!
* Buy any brand of meat in any grocery store and be confident it won't make my family sick.
* Visit any barber and be confident I won't get a weird scalp infection
* Fly with any airline and be confident I'll get to my destination alive
USDA organic comes to mind.
Just as libertarians are often overly black and white, so are regulatory regimes.
Like, why do we have maximum seating limits and doors that open outside? You could be a completely honorable restaurant owner, religiously clean the kitchen every day, and strive to give your patrons the best meal every day. And then one day an old wire shorts out, the restaurant catches fire, and people are trapped inside pushing against a door opening inward - something you've never even thought about the whole time. Everybody dies.
* Under libertarian thinking, once everybody dies the grieving families can take their business elsewhere, thus proving that we needed no regulations, after all.
If a barber starts acting in a way that makes their customers come down with infections, customers will take their business to the other barber down the street. If this new barber does the same, you will simply go to the next barber.
In this scenario, the first barber to treat their customers well (in a manner that does not pass on infections) will gobble up all the business.
Hence, it makes no sense for any barber to act in a manner that gives their customers infections, as they will quickly go out of business.
Same reason restaurants are naturally incentivized to cook their food as well as possible. 1 food poisoning case is all it takes for their business to go poof.
A true free market (as in, one where there's sufficient competition) keeps businesses in check, and protects customers.
Food poisoning is actually a great example of why we need health regulations and inspections. In a given day, we eat so many different things, it would be nearly impossible to accurately attribute a single incident to a single source. Imo the only reliable way to increase safety is to have a common set of standards that are enforced by the state.
Which, in the real world, is the case with almost everything.
Vendors don't tend to cheat or cut corners or perform malfeasance on shit that's easy to spot.
Worse yet, the customer often can't tell the difference between malfeasance and bad luck. Without an independent regulator looking into this crash, I will have no idea if the airline operating it was staffed by morons and cutting corners, or it did everything right and got unlucky.
And no, the legal system doesn't solve this problem, because any sane company will have a strong preference towards a quiet, confidential settlement, to expose as little of their dirty laundry as possible to the public and prospective customers.
Libertarianism collapses upon contact with the real world, because it depends upon informational symmetry. Yet the way businesses actually operate, it's all informational assymmetry. I don't have the time to devote my life to trying to pick out which vendor will try the least hard to fuck me over, and even if I did have that time, I wouldn't have the information necessary to make an informed choice.
Why is it that restaurants, barbers, car washes, and other small business industries have thrived for so long despite minimal regulation?
One reason is the high competition. If you've ever run a restaurant, you know the importance of making customers happy. Because customers have so many other options to choose from. They can easily take their business elsewhere. So you have to perform.
That's essentially how the "logic" goes. If the airplane company kills people, we just have to stop giving them our business, problem solved, all is good now.
Spend some time talking to a Libertarian zealot. Not saying that you should believe any of their assertions. Let alone adopt their worldview. But you might get a sense of how less-government-is-always-better "logic" works.