For those of you who don’t see the value of government regulation, read this. Some companies will happily trade safety for profits.
When you “let the market decide,” good people die.
The owner of the West Virginia coal mine where an explosion killed 29 men last year kept two sets of books on safety conditions – an accurate one for itself and a sanitized one for the government, federal regulators said Wednesday.
Managers at Massey Energy pressured workers at the Upper Big Branch mine to omit safety problems from the official set of reports, said Mine Safety and Health Administration official Kevin Stricklin. Workers told investigators that the company wanted to avoid scrutiny from inspectors and keep coal production running smoothly.
Sorry, Mark, but that doesn’t logically follow. The accident occurred with enormous amounts of regulation in place and operating – the managers were deliberately misleading regulators. According to Wikipedia, the mine had 1,100 cited safety violations in the three years before the accident, and regulators had ordered parts of the mine closed 60 times in the year before the accident.
You can logically argue that more government regulation was needed or that regulation needed to be improved, or you can logically argue (as I would) that this is an obvious failure of government regulation and that the market would never have tolerated so many blatant violations. However, the one thing you can’t argue is that the current government regulation had significant value, because the accident occurred under regulation.
So, the only alternative is to grab our pitchforks and recreate the final scene in Frankenstein? Regulation doesn’t help because people are dishonest and the law can’t help because people are dishonest? Better to pretend that the business will fail and that will be punishment enough? The business just got sold passing along its value to its old stock holders and its methods to its new owners. Your argument is giving up and passing on responsibility to a market. A market that you admit is governed only by greed and self interest. I think I’ll take the vagaries of government regulation to what we see the market do.