Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky @ Cato Unbound

At the obvious risk of making this too political (in my defense, everyone else started it), I'm not sure "no one except us ever realizes how bad regulation is" is the real problem here.

In my metacontrarianism post I talked about how when someone discovers a counterintuitive idea that only smart people can understand, they can become very excited and use it as a membership test for the Secret Society Of Smart People, to the point where they enter a Happy Death Spiral and blow it out of all proportion.

(for example, it's easy to think of ways modern Western civilization is better than primitive tribal civilization - more wealth, less prejudice, fewer tapeworms. There are also a few counterintuitive hard-to-understand ways primitive tribal civilizations are better than us - closer family bonds, more attuned to the natural world. And so many intellectuals focus on these to the exclusion of everything else and talk about how Western society is hopelessly corrupt and evil. Where they should be saying "Western civ is great, but not quite as great as the average person might think," we instead get "Western civ is awful." This passes unchallenged because the good things about Western civ like absence of tapeworms have become background noise to which everyone has adjusted. One interesting marker for this kind of behavior is that people still feel contrarian when they say it even though everyone who hears it agrees with them.)

I feel that some aspects of opposition to regulation might be this kind of behavior. There's a large background of successful regulation (like banning lead and fluorinating water and not dumping trash on the streets and so on) that no one ever notices (unless they've just come back from a country that doesn't have it!) There's also some highly available examples of regulation that goes wrong. People feel like these must be hard to catch and so can start a death spiral around how intelligent they are to notice.

So my explanation for why so many people don't understand that regulation is bad would be that this lack of understanding is not an actual phenomenon that exists in the real world. The US House of Representatives is currently dominated by a movement entirely based on eliminating as many regulations as possible as loudly as possible, and even their opponents pay lip service to the same ideas. This is another one of those cases where people say something everyone agrees with but still consider themselves "contrarian", which as I mentioned above makes me suspicious of a signaling effort.

I think the problem is less that no one understands regulation can be bad, than that talking about how no one understands regulation can be bad is a powerful signal.

...which still leaves the question of why most people who assert that they hate regulation support most actual regulation (eg Ron Paul will never get elected). I can think of a few explanations. Most cynically, they back away from their signaling when it has consequences, the same way the anti-Western-civ people would never actually move to a primitive tribe. Less cynically, there may be a status quo bias in which they process "new" regulation differently from existing regulation (though that wouldn't explain why people tend to support a lot of new regulation too). I think most plausibly it's a difference between Near and Far mode reasoning - regulation in the abstract is Far, any specific law is Near - and neither mode is necessarily "better" than the other.

Regulatory capture is a sort of funny case because though the concept was invented by a Marxist (if memory serves), only economists and libertarians seem to think about it.

I haven't actually heard the term "regulatory capture" before, but the concept of big businesses owning regulators is a pretty universal rallying cry of the left.

Regulatory capture is a sort of funny case because though the concept was invented by a Marxist (if memory serves), only economists and libertarians seem to think about it.

There's nothing really funny here: regulatory capture is a theory of how the social democratic mixed economy etc is prone to certain sorts of institutional failure in accomplishing its goals, so of course the various sorts of people who don't believe in that will find it appealing. Likewise, you'll see both Marxists and libertarians readily endorse the idea that the purpose of most welfare provisions is to control and manage the destitute population, and so on. If only economists and libertarians seem to think about it, that's probably because you know a lot more libertarians.

The impulse to regulate derives from the human tendency to live in hierarchical societies, such as monarchies. It's been a long time since we developed governments other than monarchies, that work by assuming people are corrupt and constructing a system that makes it unlikely for anyone to be especially oppressed. But our instinct is always to forget that is how our government works, and think our problems can be solved by getting the right person as president, CEO, or whatever.

(Why has no one developed a democratic corporation?)

Exactly the same tendency makes us instinctively think that problems should be solved by having a (problem domain) king who solves them.

Cato Unbound is often quite good.

I suspect you could get more cred in the party here wearing an SS death's head ring than having a black girlfriend.

Most libertarians I know of consider the Nazis to be on the opposite end of the political landscape from them, and so would look askance at someone displaying their regalia.

computer programming and science fiction and Bayesian statistics don't have anything to do with the current spectrum of American political discourse as far as I can tell.

They are characteristics of the empirical cluster of people whose political stances Eliezer was describing.

I have been to a couple of their events and I have never seen a participant who was obviously not Caucasian.

Which is ironic because the "open borders" movement really only exists amongst Libertarians. I'm aware that there is a strong xenophobic movement in Tea Party / Lib folks.

I'm in AZ, by the way. Home of SB1070.

There are several distinct clusters of very different kinds of people who call themselves libertarians or are likely to be identified as such by the mainstream. Although there is some occasional overlap, they typically don't like each other at all. Two major sharply opposed clusters are the Beltway libertarians and the Mises Institute ones. There is also the techno-geek cluster, which has some overlap with the Beltway one and much less with the Mises one, the gun-show netherworld cluster (nowadays largely faded), and a large assortment of independent crackpots. (There are of course also the Randians, but they are apt to perceive the L-word as a gross insult.)

The U.S. Libertarian Party, from what I've observed, is rather loose and decentralized and isn't limited to any particulat cluster, though unsurprisingly it tends to draw disproportionately from the crackpot elements.