On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 9:42 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 3/24/2013 10:45 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >> On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 6:19 PM, Stephen P. King <stephe...@charter.net> >> wrote: >>> >>> On 3/24/2013 7:12 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >>>> >>>> By the way, regulation only "protects us" from accessing effective >>>> treatments if we are too poor. Quacks can always find some loophole to >>>> explore. >>>> >>>> Telmo. >>> >>> At what point does the regulation become only a means to suppress >>> innovation? >> >> In my view, this happens when it regulates behaviours that only have >> personal consequences or consequences within the sphere of a group of >> consenting people. So 99% of regulation crosses that line. > > The trouble with that standard is that almost any regulation will impact > *something* that is merely personal for *someone*.
That is only troublesome if you have a preconceived notion that a lot of regulation should exist, so you're begging the question. > If the government > regulates the ownership of machine guns that impacts the behavior of a few > people who like to shoot machine guns at targets. Sure, but if we are serious about personal freedom we should measure the impact of restricting machine guns and be willing to revert the ban if no clear positive effect is found. The real reason why governments restrict machine guns is self-preservation, not concern with the population in general. The idea that politicians are more benevolent than the average person is mysticism. It actually takes a lot of brainwashing to trust the government. We are biologically wired not to trust strangers, and yet we blindly trust politicians, who are complete strangers to almost everybody. The media does the job of giving us the illusion of knowing them. They understand our biological triggers very well. That's why the president is usually a tall guy with good hair, a boring suit and a boring family, who did not inhale. > So I would say there is a > question of balance. That doesn't help because "balance" is a subjective term. What people always mean by "balance" is how close society is to how they think it should be. This creates a self-reinforcement loop, where the more people are pressured to conform, the less they can see the alternatives. I would prefer a state of self-organized criticality (e.g the Internet) instead of "balance". > If the regulation's *main* effect is to restrict > strictly personal freedoms it is a bad regulation, but some instances of > personal restriction may have to be tolerated if they are necessary to > regulate things with much greater public effects. Agreed, but that would only work if honest scientists were in charge (which is an utopia like any other). Otherwise we get the current state of affairs: all regulation is forever, not matter how much hard evidence is found against it. Cheers, Telmo. > Brent > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
