The "Hidden" Cost Of Privacy 217
Schneier points out an article from a while back in Forbes about the "hidden" cost of privacy and how expensive it can be to comply with all the various overlapping privacy laws that don't necessarily improve anyone's privacy. "What this all means is that protecting individual privacy remains an externality for many companies, and that basic market dynamics won't work to solve the problem. Because the efficient market solution won't work, we're left with inefficient regulatory solutions. So now the question becomes: how do we make regulation as efficient as possible?"
Re:Schneier the capitalist (Score:2, Informative)
Free markets *are* efficient -- it's the fundamental state of affairs for any market.
That is not universally accepted [wikipedia.org]. In order for markets to be efficient, everyone must (1) be rational (but people are known to often not be rational), and (2) have perfect information (but information is expensive to obtain, verify, and sort through... at what point does the cost of obtaining better information outweigh the benefit of obtaining that information?).
Re:Begging the proposition. (Score:3, Informative)
However, the cost to society in the form of radically more serious injuries makes sense for the market to have these rules in the long run.
Does it? The fact of the matter is that all of the safety devices on cars have probably doubled the price of cars, and yet, the greatest thing that has lowered the fatalities has been better driver education, not any of the tech goodies. If you had a car without any safety devices whatsoever, you would have car payments 1/2 of what they are today, allowing for people to save more for college, lower their debt, get themselves out of poverty, but instead, your artificial regulatory price increases just keeps making poverty worse.
The scary communist solution is to demand outside inspections from a third party - the best option being the government.
The problem with your whole point is that you would assume that the government would, in fact, actually do the inspections. What would really happen is that the government would not do the inspections, people would still die of Salmonella, and then the problem would restated as a request for more public funds.
Now, why is the government a good idea? Because people without money can compel it to be transparent. If you had a private party doing the inspections, you could not review their actions. All of the criticism of the FDA is possibly only because as a state entity, it must be transparent.
Government is completely non-transparent and non-accountable, that's the whole point. Why should the FDA be transparent? It's not like there's another FDA. The fact is, its not.
Re:Begging the proposition. (Score:3, Informative)
. Your example is lame in that it excuses (ignores)
Dude, I've stood in supermarket lines and asked people if they care. They don't. Why do you always have to assume that people are stupid when they are not?
Re:Ferengi (Score:3, Informative)
Well-designed markets can't solve all the world's problems, but neither can anything else, and markets have a long history of solving problems more effectively than most of the alternatives.
You fail to explain what "well-designed" means.
Is "well-designed" code for "well regulated"?
Without regulation, you end up with markets that are less 'free'.
(See: 19th America & the trust busting that followed)