Uber's fatal self-driving car accident is the reason why we don't let companies make their own rules No. Government regulations make us feel better; they provide jobs to people who do little and are paid well. We don't feel too restricted by the regulations, and we are willing to believe the BS that rules are effective. There is scant evidence that regulations are ever effective. More below. Here is a graph of workplace fatalities from 1933 to 2008 with the date OSHA was enacted. Notice the lack of difference before and after the OSHA enactment. There is no inflection in the graph indicating that OSHA changed workplace safety or lowered workplace deaths. Bare government regulations seldom have a significant effect. But if we look back to the beginning of the graph, we see that workplace deaths in the early 1930s were rising, but by about 1938 they take a significant dip. This was not caused by the 1929 stock market crash, and the depression had been in effect for more than eight years. It is unlikely that either of these was the reason for the decline in workplace deaths.
In fact, they weren't. Workplace deaths were driven down by Workers' Compensation Insurance which businesses and labor had lobbied for, and the first statutes were enacted in 1902. After that, the state quickly moved to adopt Workers' Compensation laws. These laws worked to reduce workplace fatalities because the insurers forced the companies to implement significant workplace safeties like machinery guards and other protective devices. The saving in insurance costs was an incentive for the business to put money into safety equipment. Bare government regulations even if accompanied with fines seldom have any effect. Government regulations on self-drive automobiles will have far less effect than will the marketplaces economic penalties in the form of stock price decline and damage to reputation. Other companies will keenly observe these effects and work diligently to stay out of the self-drive car fatality spotlight. In fact, regulations are more likely to act as a protectant than as a deterrent if enacted. Facebook has already initiated this tactic. Facebook is demanding to be regulated. Why? Because they know that if they are all they need to do is meet the minimum the regulation requires. If something terrible happens, they are covered. They can claim they complied, and then publically lobby for more regulation. This protects them from the brunt of the opprobrium. High levels of regulation are protection for the companies, not an additional deterrent. Broadly stated rules are more effective than precise narrow rules. The narrow seem better but offer far more gaps and spaces within which the companies can manipulate the rules. I have decades of administrative litigation, that's my 0.02 cents. But people love to regulate others believing that the government will actually fix the problem. And I haven't even gotten to regulator capture where the regulated entity and the regulator work closely together for decades and take on an adversarial stance towards the customer, for whom the regulations were presumably drafted. So, it is much worse than even my analysis above implies.
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