I have a long drive to get home and it gives me time to think. Today, I was ruminating on the fact that I am so okay with traffic signals and lanes while I am against government-imposed regulation in almost every other form.
Why? I think the reason is because traffic control works and it does not impose an undue cost. Why does it work when, in my eyes, government almost always fails to accomplish its goals?
Why does a stop sign work?
I'll tell you one reason that is definitely not why it works. Stop signs do not work on account of enforcement for the simple reason that there is not enough enforcement to make them work.
If stop signs worked on account of enforcement, people would come to a full stop every time because they were afraid of the consequences. People don't because they aren't.
The reason why stop signs and other traffic signals work is because they inform people in a way that is useful to them. They say "someone has thought about this intersection for a while and they think people should come to a full stop, here, or they'll risk collision."
Different people do different things with that information. Some people, like me, come to a full stop and look at all the other directions from which vehicles may approach and then proceed through the intersection. Other people slow down and look around to make sure there is not risk and then roll through the intersection.
Almost everyone, however, pays some level of attention to a stop sign and, really, to almost any traffic sign or signal. Again, that's because there is a useful recommendation being made that is trusted by its recipient.
This is the direction I think I would like to see our regulations go. Instead of telling bankers what they can and cannot do, we should provide benchmarks that must be met in order to be a "Grade A Financial Institution" or some such. Instead of telling people what they can and cannot put on the air based on Christian values, we should provide ratings that Christians can use to regulate their media intake.
Instead of trying to control what food people can eat or what drugs they can consume we should simply say "this has't been tested... knock yourself out but don't come crying to us when things go south."
Why do I like this system better than one wherein regulations occur? The obvious reason is that, instead of infringing on the liberties of producers, it increases the freedoms of consumers by way of education. There's another, less obvious reason though. I bet that yielding recommendations cost a lot less than enforcing regulations; a lot less.
Even less obvious is the fact that ratings probably work better than rules in the first place. Psychologically, they are positioned as tools of collaboration rather than oppression, which probably helps them get adopted more quickly and thoroughly. Mechanically, they have the property of aiming markets at problems and markets have conclusively shown themselves to be better decision-makers than central planners.
This seems like a good balance, to me. Any rational do-good-er should be satisfied with the outcome of government simply recommending what is safe and what is not. Any rational Libertarian should be satisfied with the increase of liberty and reduction in expense. Some of us are willing to entertain the thought that there really are "greater good" things where the impact is so high and the burden is so low that it makes sense to couple them to government.
Now, I'm not saying that there is no place for regulation at all. For instance, there is a real conversation to be had between environmentalists and Libertarians. My guess is that the two frameworks can be reconciled nicely as (for instance) things like dumping poison into a water table, which is a sin from the perspective of an environmentalist, also constitutes an assault in the Libertarian model.
What I am saying is that, in most cases, there really isn't a useful conversation to be had about whether or not an individual should be told what they can use or a company can be told what they should sell. If you want to restrict what consenting people do with their own bodies and properties, you are wrong. Simple as that. Until you can accept that you have no right to interfere in such things, you have no right participating in the political process at all.
In fact, anyone who believes that it is one person's right to tell some other group of consenting individuals what they can do should really do us all a favor and just shut the hell up altogether.
