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.
If it weren't for regulators, that facility would still be operating and poisoning people. And the reason it got so bad was because regulator alarm bells were ignored for two years.
I wouldn't even know that they were poisoning people if it weren't for regulation. And while this has lost me as a customer for life from them, what am I going to do when the other giant national meatpacker turns out to be doing the same damn thing?
Not eat meat, I guess. It'll be a libertarian success story.
In my original comment, I discussed why you can't have no regulations in an industry that's highly concentrated.
Deregulating only works if and only if the underlying industry is highly competitive.
The meatpacking industry is not highly competitive: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2024/january/concentrat...
Hence, regulations are needed.
Having multiple vendors to choose from doesn't do anything for me when I can't make an informed choice.
I'd argue no. I have no idea if the cook that made my meal 30 seconds ago actually followed proper safety guidelines.
However, I think in general, the probability is decent that they did, as they are highly incentivized to do so. Because a failure to do so could mean the end of their business.
What I'm getting at is that there are specific scenarios where market forces are stronger than the ability to make an informed choice. And protect you as the consumer better.
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.