> > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.

> Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened?

Ok, so you just don’t know history. Many people died. Fuck have you never even heard of the Jungle?

Upon Sinclair wasn’t even trying to get food regulations to improve the quality, he was trying to improve workers rights but the public was so disgusted with what food companies were doing to their food that we as a society demanded the government regulate it.

Or superfund sites?

Getting rid of government regulations in their entirety just cedes all the decision making power to corporations.

I am sick and tired of these libertarian types who either want to repeat experiments that have never succeeded in their utopian outcome or that want to convince us that the corporate boot tastes so much better than the government one.

> Getting rid of government regulations in their entirety just cedes all the decision making power to corporations.

The massive power that corporations have, as compared to individuals, is itself a product of the fact that our society has evolved now for well over a century to have government regulations that are bought by corporations to favor them. So you are correct that we can't just instantly scrap every government regulation, but not change anything else.

That does not mean that the regulations, on net, are doing more good than harm. It just means we've gotten ourselves into a very deep hole, which we can't climb out of in a short time. But at the very least we could try to stop digging.

How do you suppose the conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry that Upton Sinclair wrote about, or those that produced superfund sites, came about? If you think it was a "free market" that did it, you are the one who doesn't know history.

The Chicago meat packing industry, for example, did much the same kind of bullying of their supply chains that Amazon and Walmart are now infamous for. And governments that were supposed to be preventing that sort of thing (since much of it was illegal even then--the tactics are basically the same ones organized crime has used for centuries, after all) did absolutely nothing to stop it. The Federal government finally stepping in and passing laws and regulations was not a case of government reining in a free market; it was a case of a bigger government stomping on a smaller government.

It did improve things, at least for a time, but what's the condition of the Chicago meat packing industry now? Or for that matter our food supply chain in general in the US, which has been regulated up one side and down the other for more than a century? We have beef full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops can't be grown profitably because the government doesn't subsidize them the same way, and a massive epidemic of obesity. So how is government regulation helping, exactly?

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