alt Hacker NewsWhy have regulations at all then? Why regulate water purity when you can choose to not drink water you're skeptical of, or why regulate food if you can just not eat food that you're skeptical of? Regulations are there not for you, who perhaps knows better, but there for the people who do not. Most people are not tech-savvy. Most people believe whatever marketing is being shoved down their throat.
An average person does not do or know how to do the due diligence of product validation, and I'd argue even the tech-savvy of us are unable to figure out if a product is going to stick around or not since what info is being given to us for analysis is limited, and heavily watered down.
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Manifesting the Invisible Hand requires a lot of prerequisites that are obviously untrue in the real world. Like that customers are able to do research and understand the findings.
I don't understand how libertarians look at the current state of things and conclude that fewer regulations would solve the problem.
Regulations are necessary where the harm that we’re protecting against is so severe that avoiding it is worth the cost and lost productivity of administering and complying with the regulation.
Food and water safety certainly fall in that category! Ensuring that early adopters of useless $700 widgets are “protected” against startups going bankrupt or otherwise discontinuing / canceling the product doesn’t seem worth anyone’s concern.
Some people’s reaction to observing anything in society that they don’t like is “that should be banned!” I don’t think that’s an appropriate reaction.
The proposed regulation would dramatically increase the risk of any investment in a new consumer hardware startup. And, there are not that many of these startups in the first place, because they’re risky enough as it is! So, the net result would be less innovation and less startups doing hardware, and I don’t think that would be a net improvement.