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U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators
(science.org)
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by ceejayoz
by ceejayoz
> Neither agency has publicly issued new formal guidance describing these requirements. Instead, officials are informing grantees individually, leaving researchers confused and concerned.
They've not even made it official. They're just randomly flagging.
Just quoting Wiki since it's quite succinct and accurate on this: "[The Wolf Amendment] prohibits the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from using government funds to engage in direct, bilateral cooperation with the Chinese government and China-affiliated organizations from its activities without explicit authorization from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress."
For another consequence of this law, when China relatively recently carried out a sample return from the Moon, they sought to share the resultant rocks/material with countries worldwide, much like NASA did in the 60s. Except Americans couldn't accept them, at least not without jumping through a million hoops first, due to this law. It's one of the ever more frequent 'I'm going to punch myself in the face because I don't like you' acts by governments.
Scientists and engineers aren't any more moral than the rest of us, and interactions between them across national boundaries raises security risks.
Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
See also the way that grants are now being distributed at NCI and NSF. Only very large grants for many many years, to reward those who are in the favored status, and kill those who are disfavored. Decision making is random and capricious, just be sure to bribe those at the top with whatever favors you can.
If the enemy is the science happening then a lack of clarity is a highly effective tactic.
What is the purported legal authority they’re acting under? Some of the housekeeping in the next years will involve pulling those statutes.
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* https://www.nsfc.gov.cn/english/site_1/international/D2/2018...
* https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260107-overseas-scho...
Therefore, these personnel restrictions shouldn't matter, right?
> After removing the 16 papers, “I said, well, Jesus, we’re not reporting anything. It’s very frustrating,” Drummond says. “I don’t know how they’re going to evaluate our productivity.”
This creates bad data where teams look less productive than they actually are. Next year, they'll use that as an excuse to cut funding.
It's actually more surprising to me that NIH and NASA research co-authored by non-Americans was supposedly not requiring scrutiny under the "foreign component" rules before this.
Before you start throwing disruptive rules at projects, you generally want to know that there is a critical security concern for that specific work. Most research just gets published a few months later, so foreign interests can just read it in a journal and download the dataset.
President after President, it goes from bad to worse.
A potato would know to never mess up with researches, the more you limit, the less access and knowledge you have access to.
The problem with scientific papers is that there is an exploitive macro economy of how many one can publish without sold evidence or research attached to the paper itself.
One has no rules
Is not precise
One rarely acts
The same way twice
One spurns no device
Practicing the art of the possible
One always picks
The easy fight
One praises fools
One smothers light
One shifts left to right
It's part of the art of the possible
...
One always claims
Mistakes were planned
When risk is slight
One takes one's stand
With much sleight of hand
Politics—the art of the possible
- Evita"The recent update to IDeA grantees was a clarification of longstanding policy, not a new directive,” the spokesperson said. “IDeA program funding has always been restricted to U.S.-based institutions and entities, with foreign institutions, non-domestic components of U.S. organizations, and all foreign components explicitly prohibited. This reflects Congress’s intent that IDeA funds be used exclusively for research capacity building within the United States—and specifically within eligible IDeA states and territories. NIH’s statement didn’t mention any other grant programs or answer multiple written questions.” [1]
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/05/22/r...
NIH has publish guidance: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-1...
It seems like the intent here is to prevent "subawards" going to foreign linked entities where the USG can't track it. The NIH is introducing a new linked award system where the foreign entity receives their own independent grant number and that primary on the application must be a US entity.
This introduces new activity codes (PF5 regular grant and UF5 cooperative agreement) where upon granting the new money the foreign entity will receive their own RF2 grant or UL2 grant (based on the original grant type).
Under the old system a grant to a US institution (like a university) could be doled out to foreigner institutions as subawards without the USG seeing where the money was going. This is a violation of FFATA and the USG wants to track these dollars because US universities are not reporting it.
Additionally the USG has grown increasing suspicious of certain countries (think russia, china) that are getting subawards that are effectively transferring US IP to these entities via pliant US individuals at an institution. This forces the PI to get a linked award and pull these folks out of the shadows where they are now identified and where the USG can run a background check on them.
This also deals with university outsourcing where an institution can get a grant and then simply pass the money off (mostly entirely) to a foreign entity where the US university became essentially a shadow distribution vehicle. Under the new rules to do this the PI must show that but funnel funds to a foreign institution that institution must offer something not readily available in the US.
Once a foreign funded entity has received money in this way and then violates policy, or breached security it falls on the university to police their grants (which mostly they can't do effectively). So the USG wants to cut out the middleman and for the foreign entity to become a direct recipient of the grant making them legal liable to the USG for all the terms and conditions. If you violate the grant the NIH can sanction them directly without going through the university.
Sure, some things are trade-secrets or national security issues or whatnot, but those are already not shared.
More than militarily the US has always led with soft-power (science, culture, etc). We are throwing all this soft-power away.
Perhaps there is a legitimate reason, but like so many things in this administration this feels like a knee-jerk reaction to... Something.
Yes.
This is an administration that has neither of those.
I mean, what else so you expect if you elect a majority of actual fascists? A fascist discriminates on every front imaginable. Things haven't become much worse simply because of the filibuster.
If they are so hell bent on keeping the "Empire at all costs", on keeping America as a hegemon, brain-draining their adversaries is an excellent strategy. Any chinese materials sciences specialist working on hypersonic missiles in America is on one less chinese guy doing the same in China.
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Today the rationale for open research is that openness accelerates it. What if you just need more electricity and silicon to accelerate it?
Lot's of weasel words.
This is not unprecedented. Restrictions tied to foreign collaboration are not new, NIH has done this as far back as 2018 if I recall. Yes, foreign research restrictions have escalated recently.
We have no official statement for either agencies. Collaborating on sensitive or classified material with identified FOCI coauthors is and always have been highly scrutinized activity. Title 32 CFR 117.11 is old. It goes back as far as DoD 5220.22-M in the '90s.
NISPM-33 Office of Science and Technology Policy efforts have been around since 2018 too or so (i am sooo old :/).
This appears to be a continuation of escalation of research-security, rather than a wholly unprecedented break from prior policy.
Where does he say that?
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Did I stumble into the Youtube or Quora comment section somehow?
It's still not remotely true that (sigh) "Obummer" was using the law to threaten grants and censor research. Trump did that. Only Trump did that. And that's a whole lot worse than wasted effort on a dumb space station.
Which, in itself, is interesting, and is something that I wasn't aware of. Think it's just an innocuous tangent in this case.
Exactly. That’s why dictatorships are so adverse to the rule of law, despite many (notably the macho-nationalist ones) being ostensibly for "law and order".
> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
Yes, it is sad. It’s Hungary all over again, just with a world-spanning blast radius.
This is what is so hard for me to handle, and it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Because no matter what happens, even if some things eventually get better, I feel like the US as I knew it is dead - there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
I had to laugh when I read a title on the Washington Post today, "President Trump faced a wall of opposition from Senate G.O.P. lawmakers, in part over his plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to reward his allies", with of all people Susan Collins in the header image. Lol, I'm sure she'll release a statement saying how she's "very concerned" and end up doing nothing anyway.
I think you are right. At the same time it’s also an opportunity to get rid of an outdated constitution and have another go, with the benefit of 250 more years of experience. Just don’t fall into complacency: this government was voted in, partly because of a toxic and polarised culture that sees compromise and consensus as weaknesses (and gerrymandering, and the electoral college, and disenfranchisement, fair enough), but also partly because a lot of people did not bother showing up. Republicans have had a grassroots strategy for decades, where they seized everything they could get, even very modest positions. That’s how they progressively ended up redrawing maps and steering politics at the state or county level. You need a long term plan and a good strategy to counter this. So don’t give up (I beg you, from the other side of the Atlantic). Even if things are bad now, they can get better tomorrow.
Which experiences? The US constitution was written with approximately 2,500 years of experience in democracies and the last 250 years has been mostly repeats of things that have happened before. It isn't obvious that anything has happened that the US constitution writers were unaware of. There have been a few innovations in public choice theory but it nothing leaps to mind as something so fundamental it would be part of the constitution.
This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this.
We have another election coming up momentarily. We have the opportunity to put a stop to this. There's good reason to think that the election will not be entirely fair, but there are limits: if people are genuinely against this, they will turn out and say so.
We'll see what happens, but even in the best possible case, tens of millions of people will come out to say "Yes, destroying American science is exactly what I want". This is not a leadership problem. This is an us problem.
But we need to believe that the USA can come back. The spoils system was eliminated once before. Slavery was eliminated. The USA ‘came back’ from Jim Crow and segregation. From Japanese internment. From the Gilded Age. From the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. From a civil war. Our modern mistake was assuming that anything is ever truly eliminated without constant effort.
Jimmy Carter's funeral a few days before Trump was inaugurated really felt like the funeral for America. The moral gulf between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump is just so vast. To imagine that the US elected someone with the integrity of Jimmy Carter in 1976... and then elected someone who is as morally bankrupt as Trump is in 2024.
> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
Indeed. Well said. I doubt we'll ever see the likes of a Carter again in the Whitehouse.
But not all is lost. Many are very eager for the reins of power to come back and for laws to be enforced. Sure, the Trump regime may tell itself that it's immune from tax audits ever again, but that's not legal and as soon as the force of law is back there are many eager attorneys with high principles that will be hired back into the DoJ and enforce the law.
We saw this after Nixon's lawlessness too. Those who abetted Nixon in breaking the law were disbarred.
Prosecutions will come. Trumps's key mistake is thinking that his popularity doesn't matter anymore. It does. It means that people with morals and ethics can legally gain power and legally enforce the law.
If Trump was at 60% popularity, I would be singing a different tune. But at 35% popularity and 60% unfavorable, there is appetite left in our democracy to remain a democracy and to go after the crooks. Even if a good 30% of that unfavorable opinion is just about people's own pocketbooks rather than the principles of law and democracy, that's enough for those who care to actually enforce law.
Be concerned, but be ready tk supppprt those who will correct the course of our ship.
Not a guarantee either.. just a hope
EDIT: But, as someone will probably point out, convoluted laws / bureaucracy does obviously not automatically mean fascism or corruption. Lots of weird laws are there to cover all sorts of edge cases.
It was important for the nazis to keep businesses running, and have most people continue their lives without noticing major changes. Most people would not come into contact with the second system, and barely knew it existed. But if you entered the second system, you often would not come out alive.
This way, they could transit into an authoritarian system without hurting the economy. They knew this and planned it, and it turned out to be correct.
I agree that the phrase is somewhat contradictory, but it is the best way to describe what was going on. As long as you were within the confines of the normative state, you experienced a rule of law. But as soon as you stepped into the prerogative state, anything could happen. So a "rule of law", except that it didn't apply to everybody, but only to most people. And importantly, the existence of the prerogative state is mostly hidden when you're in the normative state (so unlike a king, which everybody knew was outside of the law)
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FTFY. From the outside, people can easily see it.
Anyway, I wonder what comes after the USAA.
The main bulwark against Russianification is not the Congress or the SCOTUS, it's the true federative nature of the US. States have a lot of very real autonomy and they limit the amount of corrupt overreach.
There's a step after that. There's an article in the current Economist about how the Russian oligarchs are being crushed by Putin's cronies and losing their assets.
We've been in this for much longer, but its been unevenly distributed.
I seem to remember a certain Biden saying to his billionaire donors "Nothing fundamental would change".
I remember Obama saying "Hope and Change", when it was 'keep gitmo open', drone strikes, and destroying 1fa via Wikileaks.
I remember Bush's "Mission Accomplished", and 25 more years of war in the sandbox. Of course, weapons manufs got bank.
Now the corruption is just more brazen. Its in everyonea faces now, and not kind of hidden. I dunno, being in the sunlight just shows how much a farce this shithole of a country is. And yeah, most is. Drive in any rural states or areas, and the poverty will hit you hard.
We're a 3rd world kleptocracy with liberal 1st world sploches in major cities.
The way to fix this is to reduce the power of the administrative state, not to just complain about Trump, but I have little hope of a real solution.
I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?
Congress. The courts have clumsily dismantled the administrative state. But there are more options than an unchecked executive and unaccountable unelecteds.
I don't agree. The division of power is most likely preferable. Otherwise the politician also become the beurocrat but way more arbitrary.
Under Chevron we had the opposite of that: bureaucrats who had ridiculously wide latitude to make their own rules.
What we actually need is for congress to take back control instead of passing all power and authority to the executive branch.
Of course, it's totally lost on the academic-bureaucratic class that the anti-intellectuals wouldn't hesitate to cut off their nose to spite their face by electing a president that would turn around and surprise pikachu the academics with the very machine they had helped build. Now that academics are losing their grips within the bureaucratic apparatus, suddenly they are deciding to rethink their strategy -- but it's not a coming to Jesus moment, but rather just a reactionary response.
Seriously, is there any other kind?
That's all being abandoned.
Lowering their taxes while burning everything to the ground benefits them now.
A less just, less stable society is far more likely to demonize and destroy billionaires. If you have such a high level of wealth the most rational action is charitability to insure the wealth of people who surround you to prevent instability and lower the chances you'll be the victim of a crime carried out due to desperation.
I am reminded by this quote from an email exchange between Bret Taylor and Alan Kay, published in 2017:
“As I pointed out in a previous email, Engelbart couldn't get funding from the very people who made fortunes from his inventions.
“It strikes me that many of the tech billionaires have already gotten their "upside" many times over from people like Engelbart and other researchers who were supported by ARPA, Parc, ONR, etc. Why would they insist on more upside, and that their money should be an "investment"? That isn't how the great inventions and fundamental technologies were created that eventually gave rise to the wealth that they tapped into after the fact.
“It would be really worth the while of people who do want to make money -- they think in terms of millions and billions -- to understand how the trillions -- those 3 and 4 extra zeros came about that they have tapped into. And to support that process.”
https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/
The titans of industry not understanding the importance of science beyond its profitable applications doesn’t surprise me at all.
"science with outside helps the other side" - done.
Current administration sees US as losing its positions, so the main answer is to close the leaks that feed its opponents with US effort
Step 1. Exploit the commons.
Step 2. Shut the door.
governments need influence, and yellow the truth,so as to manage the overall situation, thats a first assumption.
now we see a lot of actions that in the end seemlike footgunning, basically derailing the foundations of civilization.
perhaps this is not megalomania, greed, or sickness.
perhaps, as is often portrayed in popular scifi, we are all doomed to face a terrible challange, there are only few very closed mouth individuals that absolutely know. [remember this is a fringe conspiracy hypothesis]
we are being distracted and kept on the dark about impending catastrophe,so as to stave off absolute chaos,little hope of influencing anyone except by overwhelming show of force. perhaps "they" know its a matter of years, not decades until we experience that thing that suddenly, seemingly cyclically clears the board and the whole assembly begins again from square 2,or 3,not quite square one. [Re fringe;conspiracy]
"they" are behaving in an all bets are off manner, keeping thier hand hidden, playing an endgame rather than making a benign effort.
It's a lot easier to get access to underpaid graduate students, fresh post-docs, etc who are doing the heavy researching lift day-to-day work. You have way more tools in your HUMINT arsenal with this population. Sometimes research has natsec implications even though it is not in pre-class or classified status.
A famous example of this is how the US created it's stealth technology initially.
"The foundation for a science-based approach to the development of stealth aircraft was laid by Petr Ufimtsev, a Soviet physicist. In 1962, Sovietskoye Radio publishing house issued his book Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction that described the mathematical rationale for the development of stealth vehicles.
In the USSR, these ideas did not go any further, however, the Americans were very enthusiastic about them. Ufimtsev’s physical theory of diffraction has become, they say, the cornerstone of a breakthrough in the stealth technology. In the 1970s, the work was started in the USA on the basis of this knowledge as a result of which breakthrough stealth aircraft − Lockheed F-117 fighter and Northrop B-2 strategic bomber – have been produced."
https://rostec.ru/en/media/news/visible-invisible-stealth-te...
There are, of course, exceptions. Some Universities do classified or sensitive research where the result is not broadly published. There are fully classified labs associated with Universities, and some that just have sensitive research. But in general these are special exceptions and should be approached on a case-by-case basis, rather than with some blanket law. The assumption for University research should be: assumed fully transparent, except where there is a specific reason it isn't.
Let us not be fooled by the obvious pretense, please.
Can anyone honestly say that the current administration is a paragon of careful scrutiny and rule-following? If you are wont to agree, then momentarily reflect if this question was ever posed in an earlier presidential administration in your lifetime.
Telling researchers that they have to get permission before they can co-author a paper with a foreign colleague is insane, unless we're talking about a very small set of highly sensitive areas like nuclear engineering.
So I think money or wealth is the bigger weight here.
Or do you think all the wedge issues organically crystallized in voters' minds?..
I can’t tell if the world how it is right now in 2026 is the way because this book’s plan went so well, or just dumb luck.
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edit: that said, from my experience, and some reporting, foreign contracts (e.g. a foreign collaborating researcher) have been regularly denied in the new NIH.
I call BS.
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I think we’ll see an even bigger economic reckoning in 2027-28, and then the pendulum will swing back. The Great Depression and Hoovervilles paved the way for the New Deal. Trump’s corruption and economic policies are likely going to be even more disastrous than that.
Hopefully we can pick up the pieces quickly and without the benefit of World Wars.
Hope? Wishful thinking?
Ask your favorite Chatbot to assemble one. A lot of them share similarities with the current situation in the US.
This is not happening by accident.
The question is what serves their interests at the time? Whatever serves their interests at a given time, well, that’s what they believe at that time. That will have no bearing on what they believe in the future.
Short of them just turning a nuke on a large city, I can't think of better ways to harm America without fomenting an actual uprising than what they're doing to us today.
Also, this government funding supports fundamental innovations that private companies wouldn't fund because it's too general and too far from monetizable. But after those breakthroughs happen funded by public research, private industry benefits enormously. This includes most health and medical advances and the science underlying most technological advances. So government funding doesn't conflict with the work being necessary or important, on the contrary, it is possibly more important long-term.
Disclaimer? The government funds some of my research.
The PMs are generally chosen from the sciences, and are responsible for authoring RFPs that meet strategic goals, and negotiate with the PIs (grant recipients) about terms and sizes and such.
So there are really two political realms, above the funding agency, and underneath, and its entire function is reconcile those worlds in a pretty vague way with a certain amount of autonomy given to the PM.
This isn't 100% great, but if you have good PM, some good science does get funding. While this seems like a lot of machinery, if you short circuit all of it, and have the presidents direct flunkies make funding decisions, that basically means that almost no real science gets done.
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It tells Usa based org got grant to research Coronaviruses. And outsourced research to China Wuhan.
Yes, because coronaviruses are one of the largest and most common family of viruses, that cause everything from the common cold to SARS and MERS. Researching coronaviruses was important long before COVID-19.
Educating yourself is a good antidote to irrational conspiracy theories.
There are useful tangents, and not so useful ones. This thread seems to insist on devolving into the latter, so I am out.
For example my top criticism of Obama is that he killed a 15 year old American child without trial. His press secretary was not only was unapologetic he said “ I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...
That father incidentally was another American killed without due process by Obummer’s personal order.
What’s your favorite Obama criticism?
What they will instead do is continually test the boundaries and shift them. They will also put in loyalists. Aka corruption. This already happened in the army by the way. It's fascinating to see how a democracy is turned into a dictatorship.
At this point if people are being taken in by the really obvious and bald lies, the problem isn't a lack of information. They're just plain stupid.
If your media system profits directly from lies and outrage, and there's a class which specifically weaponises lies and outrage for self-servingly cynical ends, the outcome is predictably suicidal.
It's like people forget Trump had an entire first term and a movement all over social media espousing their authoritarian ideals and accelerationist goals.
January 6th happened during his first term and half the country cheered. He had supporters in the government talking about a coup back then.
They literally published their plans in an itinerary. It had bullet points and everything.
And to this day people still support him. That's how you know the "nobody voted for this" line is just hogwash. A third of the country still supports everything he's doing, and they would vote for him again if they could.
No one who voted for Trump this time gets to plead ignorance. Complicity or stupidity, those are the options.
Anyone who still voted for Trump is tacitly in support of the Jan 6th rioters and therefore, essentially, no rule of law, no Constitution, just "what this guy says, goes".
And a majority of voters choose that. That's scary for the upper 50% of the bell curve.
It's also scary for pretty much any other country because whilst the US has its own cultural bias, there's something deeply humanly emotive that's being tapped, and can therefore be tapped in many, many other democratic countries.
In many ways the current evils of the US are abusing the ways our government is least democratic.
The way the Senate and the electoral college weakens the power of some votes, the checks of Congress on the executive branch, and the appointment system of the Supreme Court all relied on political norms to confer stability. Those norms are being broken in favor of raw political power which is undermining the checks & balances fundamental to our country.
In few other stable democracies would such slim electoral victories result in such sweeping power. Our nation has relied on norms and civility for its stability as much as law, and discarding those makes our democracy substantially worse.
Trump received 49.8% of the vote, 1.5% more than Harris, and his power and ability to engage in corruption is virtually unchecked. In other countries with stronger democratic systems he would be forced to compromise to attain a stronger majority.
According to Alex Karp, who leads a data analysis company. And therefore it should be impossible to trust any data analysis coming from said company.
There was a recent video that made the rounds where judicial nominees were testifying in the Senate and they were all asked "Who won the 2020 election?" These people are not complete idiots - they know who won the election. They all gave the same bullshit "well, Biden was certified as the President elect" non-answer simply because they knew that if they told the truth they would face Trump's wrath. Profiles in Total Cowardice, every last one.
Boomers will see the ai generated video and believe it immediately.
Will the Democrats run such a person? I don't have much hope.
Carter won basically because Ford pardoned Nixon.
Trump maganed to hand the Stair of Hormuz over to Iran, and instigate massive inflation personally. The US is laughed at or ignored or treated as a problem on the world stage now, rather than being the leader.
However, the more sociopathic in society see Trump as strong, for some weird reason, and Carter as weak, for some weird reason. Very strange.
And that was mostly hanging around from earlier oil shocks and the spending on Vietnam. He did the right thing by choosing Paul Volker to be Fed chair. In Carter's interview of Volker he asked what he would do to bring down inflation. Volker replied that he would significantly raise interest rates. Volker figured that he didn't get the job based on this honest response and was surprised when Carter picked him.
The President is not in fact on the ballot this year, and quite a few will say "I don't like the President, but I like the local Republican candidate more than the local Democratic candidate". Except that the President should be on the ballot: the only serious question facing Congress is whether they will support his policies or take measures to oppose them. That's going to happen exclusively along party lines. Nothing else that either candidate promises actually matters.
It's all made worse by efforts to put a thumb on the scale. That, above all else, makes this feel like the last chance we'll have to fix this. I'm going to hold out hope that we'll take it.
Politicians have long understood that it's easier to get elected by being fearful of their opponents than with your own merits. We've just taken the next logical step: actively attacking them, in words and with restrictive actions. It hasn't yet proceeded to violence, for the most part, but that's only because people still haven't gotten bored with this level of harassment.
There was no rule of law, just arbitrary decisions handed down by nazi party judges.
Also, the existence of parallel non judicial system makes it literal opposite of strong rule of law. It is not a rule of law when a SA thug can beat and imprison you for winning over him in cards - which was the literal situation in Third Reich.
> Most people would not come into contact with the second system, and barely knew it existed.
Everyone knew about the parallel system. The fear and terror were base of power. There were no attempts to hide it and many attempts to publicize it by nazi.
Moreover, the whole thing started by repression and arrests of high profile political opposition. People do notice that famous writers are in hiding, that the leaders of the strongest party run away, are in prison and then dead. It was impossible to not know about the parallel system or widely publicized repressions. But, a German in question might have been someone who agree with those or benefits from those.
In practice, it turns out otherwise.
E.g. Trump sent ICE goons to MN and now he's embroiled in dozens of lawsuits because of that. Yes, he probably will win most of them eventually, but they all take time and energy. With a lot of negative PR along the way.
If states had autonomy, those animals and their accomplices would be behind bars right now.
Give it time.
> If states had autonomy, those animals and their accomplices would be behind bars right now.
So that southern states could just shoot the Federal agents de-segregating schools, right? It's always a balancing act.
The key here is that the power is _distributed_. Nobody has the absolute power, even if it seems so. And it doesn't even matter that much that individual states are less than incorrupt (see: TX, WA, IL). All that matters is that they have their own agendas that don't necessarily align with the Federal one.
As are many, I’m sure.
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I don’t think it’s workable. At best it just swaps lobbyists for civil servants.
On paper it's different but in practice congress would largely be rubber stamping things. I predict the differences would be largely negative. More room for non-experts to meddle, more room for lobbyists to insert themselves into the process, and more room for broad capture of the advisory body to go unnoticed.
Nothing will work when the courts decide giving money is speech and now protected. Super pacs have unlimited spending and shield donors.
It's hard to change. You need a new supreme court or amendment to remove super pacs then you need to convince the people who got in power by having more money to limit donations to an amount an average American can afford. Then you need laws to fix gerrymandering or possible an amendment. Then you need radical laws to deal with immigration vote buy which mlght involve rules not allowing people not born in the country from voting.
And then we will realize that people with more money will actually need more power because they have bigger needs. So they will start buying people through convert ways (media ownership, ai filtered data, ...) and we'll have more disinformation. Maybe this is the best democracy can offer.
I don't know what the exact solution is, but something needs to change in the structure and incentives of congress to incentivize them to exercise power again. Eliminating the filibuster and drastically increasing the total number of representatives seem like the best ways to me, but I'm open yo other possibilities.
The government is good and does good things. We need more of it not less.
Just be upfront that you’re a libertarian and are allergic to government.
If you actually believe this is true, I have some sad news for you. Does the term "regulatory capture" mean anything to you?
> those awful technocrats
If you actually believe the "technocrats" have the knowledge required to craft regulations that actually are a net benefit, again, I have some sad news for you.
There is another option, which is to not dictate rules at all, unless you absolutely have to in order to have a civil society in the first place. For example, we have laws against things like murder and theft and fraud, because you can't have a civil society if those things aren't deterred and punished.
But the vast majority of the laws and regulations we have in place now are not doing that. They're attempts to micromanage from the top something that fundamentally cannot be micromanaged from the top. Nobody has enough knowledge to do that. So we should stop doing it.
Congress knew of that issue; for decades, Congress has delegated the nitty gritty to regulatory agencies, who employ said experts.
SCOTUS, on the other hand, are the idiots you seek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...
But I'm not dumb enough to think you'll believe my words, you'll only learn by experience.
Just look at the (first) Gilded Age. It's pretty much you claim we didn't have in the past: Family dynasties and government sympathetic to the interests of wealthy business stakeholders. It took the better part of a century of hard fighting (including literal combat in some cases) to bring that to an end, and then we had what, 40 years? before the accumulated momentum of conservatism brought on the Reagan era.
And it's not a matter of just unions fighting it out in the textile mills and coal mines and railcar assembly plants either. After the Civil War the US Army was engaged in a widespread program of what would today be categorized as genocide, in service of business interests that thought they could make more money if you didn't have a pre-existing civilization in the Great Plains.
Go back a few decades further and you have the Civil War itself. Slavery was first and foremost profitable for cash crop plantation owners; everything follows from that.
Probably can't happen without huge changes to the tax code IMO.
That said, I think bringing the amount of research science we have under the umbrella of academia has been bad because it's basically introduced a plausible deniability and reputation laundering layer that furthers the 3-way revolving door between academia, government and industry.
IIUC, industry does get R&D tax credits- but that's probably not a good incentive system for basic research in industry.
What's happening now is that a small number of science-friendly rich people are making foundations/institutes that carry out basic research (Zuckerberg/Chan, Schmidt, and a few others) but it's unlikely those will completely supplant academic research at universities funded by NIH/NSF/DOE.
Allowing others to build wealth just makes society less stable from their point of view. Better to keep the poor poor.
here lies hidden assumption that host country is better at commercializing its education results than origin country at onshoring
try substituting Nauru (tiny island nation) in that sentence and ask yourself a question - is it more likely for (hypothetical) "graduates of Nauru University" to find work on tiny island - or to fly home with newly learned skills?
when you aren't in adversarial position, "any chance is worth it". As soon as you start thinking "us vs them" - details and assumptions start to matter and math may point in the other direction
It would also be beneficial even if he didn’t do that, but helped others do that.
I'm not just referring to restrictions on collaborations with foreign researchers, although I frankly do not see how that meaningfully reduces the ability of opponents to benefit from US research unless we kill open publishing as well. I'm talking about the last year and a half of destroying the ability of every basic researcher I know to work in a stable and predictable environment.
2. Science trends toward meritocracy, which is bad if your goal is to promote a particular social hierarchy.
And 2020 further revealed that science is not immune from politics or its own religious ideals.
Recent MAHA-era large-scale funding opportunities have embraced this as "gold-standard science", and explicitly require separate reproducibility teams.
“Drumpf” and “Cheeto” would beg to differ
No, but we shouldn't excuse wrongdoing by one by reference to something vaguely related by the other. It's fine to criticize both Trump and Obama. It's not fine, as the upthread commenter did and which you are defending, to criticize the Obama administration for actions taken by the Trump administration.
Or did you forget all the journalists kicked out of the Pentagon, the exclusion of the associated press over their use of the internationally recognized name for the Gulf of Mexico, the threatened cancellation of FCC licenses of ABC and CBS regarding their reporting, etc.
The sociopaths (at least the high functioning ones) are simply doing what they can to climb the ladder.
Those fucks were violating both federal and state law.
'Give it time' will only work if the GOP is removed from power. Otherwise, not a single thing will happen.
Otherwise, you are demonstrating that states are in practice fully subservient to the federal government. Because the latter can, de facto, do whatever it wants in them.
Not true btw, the military can do it.
In Russia, it would have been one phone call from the Kremlin to the local chief of police.
The US is actually unusual in that the President does not have _any_ local control over police. You'll see a similar pattern pretty much everywhere: schools, construction, licensing, urban policy, etc.
Nah, that was it. Not much more going on in that empty dome. Honestly the void your brain represents is kind of relaxing.
For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
The current federal limits include:
Cyanide: 0.2 mg/L
Uranium: 30 µg/L
Gross alpha particles: 15 picocuries per liter (pCi/L). Beta particles and photon emitters: 4 millirem/year dose equivalent
Nor is it what I advocated.
> Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity
That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their markets.
> 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?
> Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
You're assuming that food and water providers would be able to do such things in a "free market". But doing such things is obviously bad for business, so providers would have a strong incentive not to do it in a free market, since in a free market, doing things that are bad for business makes you go out of business.
In our current regulatory environment, however, large corporations can do many things that are bad for business, as long as they can get government regulators to agree to let them. For an example from a few years ago, a major aicraft manufacturer got the FAA to approve a change to one of its oldest aircraft types that ended up killing two airplanes full of people. How? Because the FAA didn't even look at the change: the "regulation" had evolved to the point where the FAA just took the manufacturer's word for it that everything was OK.
In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business. But of course in our current regulatory environment that can't happen, because regulation has forced aircraft manufacturers to amalgamate to the point that neither of the two biggest ones can ever be allowed to go out of business--too many long chains of dominoes, including much of the US's military capability (and not just in airplanes), depend on them.
Tell me again how regulations make things better?
> humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years
You really can't compare pre and post industrial revolution like that. Large scale synthesis of toxic chemicals as a byproduct of some unrelated industry just wasn't a thing previously.
> In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business.
Extremely doubtful. Air travel has been intentionally pushed to a ridiculously high level of assurance by regulation. I don't think the free market would have selected for the current cost vs safety balance on its own.
I appreciate where you're coming from, that a large portion of existing regulation is gratuitous, being structured the way it is primarily for the benefit of the incumbent. But that doesn't mean that such regulation isn't doing anything useful at the same time.
Like for example the amount of water a toilet flush can has been federally regulated since the 90s. Sure, that might be important if you need to keep some schmucks in the desert from bickering over aquifer depletion and whatnot. But the majority of jurisdictions in the east "we take surface water and give it back to the same watershed" jurisdictions who can use all the water they want and only impact the required size of the hardware at the treatment plant. So why are we even regulating this? And any issue you look into there's a plethora of stuff like that. Theoretically it's all justifiable in abstract but that's like littering, it doesn't scale.
[1] via "states shall adopt in order to qualify for this grant" type rules which the states then roll downhill
The current US code, printed as a book, could not be read in five lifetimes of daily 9-5 reading. Make reading the law aloud a requirement of their job -- they're not permitted to stop until they've completed it, except they may sleep at night and they may assemble to vote to remove laws which are no longer needed. Failure to read the laws at the start of their tenure results in being held in federal court for the duration of their time in office.
- ethnic identity tying one to country of origin (Chinese people identify as Chinese and see their country of origin as their people, Americans rarely hold the same view)
- asymmetry (America is best for education and business)
- strong national government which pursues its interests
Saudi Arabia is a bizarre choice because it isn't exactly a research powerhouse. America might be ahead, but China is the clear runner up and is catching up thanks to what might as well be an intentional effort to undermine American science.
Possibly not. Possibly in a free market people still would fly on an aircraft type that was known to have had two recent crashes that killed everyone on board. I wouldn't, but perhaps I'm an outlier.
But if people would be willing to fly on such an aircraft in a free market (which means that the value of flying on it, to them, is greater than the cost, even including the expected cost of the risk of a fatal crash), then the logical consequence is not that our air travel regulations are doing good; it's that our air travel regulations are overestimating (possibly drastically) the value we actually put on human life, and therefore are diverting large amounts of resources to things that actually are worth less to us than they cost. That's not a net benefit.
(also, without the safety reporting infrastructure and mandatory disclosures the average person would have absolutely no ability to learn whether the crashes said anything about the safety of the aircraft as a whole. You'd have never known about the 737 Max crashes otherwise, just like if you've ever flown before you evidently didn't know about the last couple of crashes that aircraft type had that killed everyone on board...)
In addition to all the other things I pointed out, there's a very simple and obvious difference between this and the airplane case: a person choosing to drive drunk imposes some risk on everyone else who uses the same road they do. But a person choosing to fly on an unsafe airplane imposes no risk on anyone but themselves; their choice doesn't force anyone else to fly on the same airplane.
There is a very simple and very obvious similarity which is that people do not consent to be hit by drunk drivers or poorly maintained aeroplanes. Hence we regulate.
Honestly, I find it unfathomable that you could write so many words across two comments trying to reinvent aviation safety from first principles and not grasp this.
You're assuming there is just one such value. There isn't. People who are willing to drive drunk put less value on human life than people who aren't. We deal with that by penalizing people for driving drunk, to give them another incentive not to do it. And, as you say, we do that because people who drive drunk are doing it on the same roads as everyone else, and many if not most people have to use the roads as part of their daily lives, and they value their lives more than the people who choose to drive drunk do.
Also, the person who drives drunk bears risk--they can get injured or killed themselves. They can control that risk
Air travel is not like that. Most people do not have to travel by air as part of their daily lives. Plus, the people who design, build, and maintain the airplanes are not the ones who bear the risks of a crash: the crews and passengers do. So the incentives involved are different.
But there's another aspect to this as well. An airline is not going to operate an airplane unless they can sell enough seats to make it profitable, and not just for one flight, for the expected lifetime of the airplane. So we're not talking about one person choosing to drive drunk. We're talking about enough people choosing to fly on an airplane type that's known to have had fatal crashes due to a design flaw, for a long enough time to make it profitable for an airline to operate that airplane. That is the hypothetical I was responding to, and in that hypothetical, you can't make the kind of argument you're making, that it's a small minority of obvious outliers who are making what you consider to be the "bad" choice.
And it wasn't my hypothetical, I was just responding to it. I actually don't agree with its premise: I don't think that in a free market enough people would choose to fly on such an airplane to make it profitable for an airline to operate it. And at least one reason why I believe that is the differences between that hypothetical scenario, and the current reality of some people choosing to drive drunk, which I've just described.
> without the safety reporting infrastructure and mandatory disclosures the average person would have absolutely no ability to learn whether the crashes said anything about the safety of the aircraft as a whole
Straw man. In a free market where people knew they could not depend on the government to "regulate" (and, as I've pointed out, it didn't in this case), people would refuse to fly on airplanes whose safety records were not well-documented and attested public knowledge. To do otherwise would be obviously foolish. The only reason people don't seek out more such information now is that they believe the government has their back so they don't have to. And that belief, as we've seen, is not justified. In a free market, indeed, a safety reporting infrastructure not very different from what we have now would be expected to evolve--but because it was not run by a government and could not take advantage of the free pass the government gets to skimp on regulations, it would have to build and maintain a justified track record of accuracy.
> You'd have never known about the 737 Max crashes otherwise
You must be joking. They were worldwide news. We didn't need government safety reporting to tell us that two 737 Max aircraft crashed killing everyone on board. Which all by itself would make any sane person not want to fly on a 737 Max aircraft until they understood what had happened and were convinced the root cause had been fixed.
Indeed, the safety reporting system, if anything, contributed to facilitating the crashes--by not bringing to light the many instances of reports by pilots of US flag air carriers about odd behavior of 737 Max aircraft in exactly the same conditions that led to the two crashes. The existence of those reports only came to light, as far as the public was concerned, after the fact, when it was too late.
Even given the current environment Boeing still tried to (unsuccessfully) shift blame away from themselves. Imagine how that might have gone differently in a "free market" where "unencumbered" by regulation there wasn't even proper investigation or disclosure.
More generally, you seem to be approaching this with the a priori assumption that whatever the free market would arrive at is the correct result. Given that we're considering the merits of various regulations it seem to me that begs the question.
Even if you eliminated the immunity shield for corporate leadership so they couldn't skate after their company goes bankrupt, there would still be innumerable risk-takers willing to gamble with human lives to make more money.
I expect the argument you want to make is that having people harmed and killed is an acceptable sacrifice for greater economic efficiency, but you're aware that it doesn't play well — especially when the benefits of economic efficiency tend to flow to the people doing the killing rather than the people being killed.
To the extent it's true that being "bad for business" is no longer enough of a disincentive for corporations, as I've already said, one key reason is that the corporations have bought regulations that favor them and disfavor potential competitors.
It's true that that's not the only factor involved. Corporate governance is broken. A big part of that is also government regulation, which does to some extent prevent outright fraud (for example, the S&L debacle in the 1980s), but is perfectly fine with other practices, like golden parachutes for executives and corporate takeovers in which the buyer gets the assets but offloads the liabilities on the taxpayers, that do just as much damage, if not more. All of these things are regulated--but the regulations don't stop harm from being done.
There is one other factor that works against corporate governance which is not, in itself, a product of government regulation: the fact that most share ownership now is not individual stockholders but mutual funds. That means most people don't even know what corporations they own even small pieces of. But mutual funds are a big advantage for most people investing for their retirement, because they're an obvious hedge against risk, so they would exist even in a true free market without any government regulation. The problem is that, as far as the individual corporations are concerned, their time horizon is now much shorter. The mutual fund has to care about providing returns over a long time horizon, because it's holding people's retirement accounts, which might not be drawn on for decades. But the corporations only see short term trades being made, many of them by those same mutual funds, trying to increase their returns. So corporations have to focus much more on short term returns instead of long term planning.
That would be one area where a government ought to be able to improve things, because a government's time horizon ought to be long-term. But it isn't. Government's time horizon is the next election. So even in this area, governments are actually worse than corporations.
I have no idea where you're getting this from; the argument I'm making is nothing at all like this. Indeed, I have pointed out many bad things that still exist even in the presence of massive government regulation, and are not stopped by such regulation even though they are exactly the kinds of things the regulation was supposed to stop. That is the opposite of what you are claiming my argument is.
> One can only make such an argument by being offensively ignorant of history.
I pointed out elsewhere in the thread who I think is ignorant of history, and it isn't me.
> 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.
Every functioning society on earth regulates food drugs and infrastructure. We lived through the unregulated version for centuries, and it took mountains of dead children and poisoned workers to win the rules we have now; tearing them down just means ordinary people will pay the price all over again.
Capture is a failure mode of every institution humans have ever built, including the courts we presumably still want. The answer is to design better institutions, not to get rid of them and hope things work out.
In the sense that we didn't have, say, the FDA, yes, that's true. But that doesn't mean food production, for example, was unregulated. It means it was regulated by the voluntary choices of people producing and consuming food. That system did not produce "mountains of dead children and poisoned workers". Those things happened after food production became a mass industry, not before.
There was a difference, before food production became a mass industry: most people knew the people who were producing their food, personally. That does change the incentives involved. One could make a case that, now that food production is a mass industry, and people don't for the most part know personally anyone who is involved with producing their food, we need regulations that we didn't need before. But that's a different argument than the one you're making.
One could also make a case the opposite way, that governments already had the tools in place to regulate food production as a mass industry--for example, by stopping large food corporations from using mafia-like methods to bully their supply chains--and failed to use them, which resulted in a bigger government--the Federal government--stepping in and stomping on them. And that the result of that, now, as I pointed out in another post elsewhere in this thread, has not been "safe food" that we didn't have before: we have meat full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops are crowded out, etc.
> The answer is to design better institutions
That effort has been going on for millennia. As Dr. Phil likes to say, how's that workin' out for ya?
Or, if you want another common saying, isn't the standard definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results this time?
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.
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?
True.
> or poorly maintained aeroplanes
But that's not something a person can affect by their choice of whether to fly on such an airplane, which is what we've been talking about, assuming the airplane is already in operation. That risk is being imposed by the airline that's skimping on the maintenance.
People can affect this indirectly, by choosing not to fly on unsafe airplanes, which will cause airlines that try to operate such airplanes to go out of business (as well as manufacturers who try to build them). Indeed, that's what I was describing when I described how a free market would result in unsafe airplanes not being flown.
Your position, in the other subthread where I responded to you a little bit ago, appears to be that people are too stupid (excuse me, "unworldly") to be trusted to regulate such things as I've described in a free market, so governments have to regulate instead. Have I got that right?
LMAO. Perhaps leave lecturing what transport looks like in the absence of regulation to people who've actually seen what transport looks like in the absence of any effective regulation (hint: the public does not rely on independent safety reports or indeed have access to much accident reporting at all, the transport is usually [over]full, and yes it kills a lot more people than commercial aircraft, sometimes including people that didn't consent to use the transport). Even specifically within the sphere of aviation there's this not-that-little country called Indonesia whose airlines were banned from operating in the West for a long time because of an extremely well known lack of adequate safety standards, and an accompanying tendency to plunge passengers to a fiery death. It was one of the fastest growing air transport markets in the world.
People whose extreme ignorance of transport safety is exceeded only by their overconfidence they'd do a better job than the regulators are of course precisely the people such regulation aims to protect.
> You must be joking. They were worldwide news
They were worldwide news because of mandatory disclosures and independent safety regulation which in unregulated transport environments simply do not exist. If these did not exist, you would have no reason to assume that aircraft crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia have any bearing on the safety of your flight in the USA. (You're evidently not aware of the other six serious crashes involving Lion Air, the operator of the first Boeing 737 Max across its first two decades of operation, and certainly won't have boycotted the aircraft types involved as a result). If you wanted to get a bus or ferry in Indonesia, you wouldn't have the first clue which ones operated to adequate safety standards or not. This is not because Indonesians trust their government; it is because the libertarian fantasy of independent third parties seamlessly filling in the knowledge gaps is not a reality. Take it from someone that actually spent the first part of their career working for a company that collected data on the aviation sector...
So why is that? Because Indonesians don't value human life the way people in the US do? Maybe that's true. Maybe there's a much wider variation in the world as far as how humans value human life, than we Westerners assume. And if that's the case, then maybe Indonesia's unsafe airlines are fine for Indonesians. But that doesn't mean that the same sort of thing would happen in the US if people in the US understood that government regulation could not be relied on to protect them from unsafe airplanes.
Or do Indonesians want safer airplanes, but can't get them? Why not? And if they want safer airplanes but can't get them, why do they fly on the unsafe ones?
> it is because the libertarian fantasy of independent third parties seamlessly filling in the knowledge gaps is not a reality.
Why doesn't this happen in Indonesia? Because the Indonesian government keeps it from happening? Historically that's the reason: governments can't regulate, but also can't allow third parties to provide the information the government can't, because that would undermine their power.
Straw man. As I pointed out in another post upthread, in a free market, nobody would fly on Boeing aircraft (or anyone's aircraft) if they did not have a well documented and attested safety record, and independent parties would be in the business of documenting and attesting to such things. And since those independent parties would not be able to get the free pass the government gets to skimp on regulations as they did with Boeing, they would have to build and maintain a track record of accuracy.
The only reason people don't seek out such information independently now is that they believe the government has their back so they don't need to. Which, of course, is an unjustified belief.
> you seem to be approaching this with the a priori assumption that whatever the free market would arrive at is the correct result.
I have made no such assumption. There is no single "correct result", and people like me who favor free markets don't do so because we think they can produce any such thing. We favor free markets not because we think they are perfect, but because the alternatives are even worse.
The history of government regulation bears this out. Sure, when everything is going nicely, regulation looks good, and it's easy to talk about how a "free market" (which actually just means "if this particular regulation were to suddenly go away without anything else changing", which is a straw man) would be worse.
But the failure modes of government regulation are worse than those of a free market. The failure mode of a free market is that transactions that could create value don't happen--people don't fly because they can't get reliable information about aircraft safety, for example, so airlines go out of business and a lot of potentially valuable things can't happen because they would need air travel as an enabler. The failure mode of government regulation, as we've seen, is that people are killed out of the blue because the government they thought was protecting them, wasn't.
[dead]
Honestly, if you're so naive about how the adult world works that you think the most likely reason why unconnected third parties don't get access to all the information required to properly audit an airline's safety practices (even if they've somehow found a B2C business model to conduct such audits) is that the government stops them, you're precisely the sort of uworldly person such regulation is intended to protect. Well, you and the people that don't trust in unregulated airlines but run the risk of being hit by their aircraft anyway....
I have never claimed "much better". But given the overall track record of government regulation in actually protecting people from the harmful things it's supposed to protect them from, it would be hard for any private effort to do worse. If you disagree with that, evidently we don't live on the same planet and there's not enough common ground between us for a useful discussion.
That said, perhaps it might help if I rephrase things somewhat. I'm accepting, at least for the sake of argument, your claim that, for example, Indonesians have no way of getting any reliable information about which buses, ferries, etc. are safe (and that the same was true of airplanes for many years, but perhaps that's changing now).
And that makes me wonder: why do people even use these things, if they have no information about their safety? Or why don't they find some way of getting the information? Why can't someone start a business that provides it? Would people just not pay for it because they think such information should be free? What's the mindset here? Am I really that much of an outlier, that it seems obviously foolish to me to be using these things if you have no way of getting reliable information about their safety? Is Indonesia, for example, really full of such "unworldly" people who need to be protected from their own unworldliness?
You call such ideas as starting a business to provide people with such information a "libertarian fantasy". To me the fantasy is the idea that government regulation can be depended on to "protect" the "unworldly" people who otherwise will happily do unsafe things. As I said above, the overall track record of government regulation gives no basis for any such belief.
> you're precisely the sort of uworldly person such regulation is intended to protect
I don't know where you're getting this from, since I've already said elsewhere in this thread that I personally would not fly on an airplane whose safety record I have no reliable information about. It's quite true that my current best source of such information is the US government. But that doesn't mean that situation is the best that can be done.
> the people that don't trust in unregulated airlines but run the risk of being hit by their aircraft anyway
I don't know what you mean by this.