From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 16:49:08 MDT
Damien Sullivan wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 01:58:19PM -0700, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
>> the formation of such bodies like EPA, or OSHA, which through the
>> decisions of career bureaucrats are rewriting the landscape of
>> America. The volume of low-quality, almost unaccountable law
>> produced by these and similar entities exceeds the law produced by
>> people's representatives (such as they might be)
>
> OTOH, the EPA and OSHA bureaucrats have a chance of knowing what
> they're doing. The EPA recruits actual scientists. What would you
> want to pin on the scientific understanding of congress?
>
### The problem with scientist-bureaucrats is that although they might have
the factual knowledge in some narrow domain (e.g. concentrations of dioxin
in Superfund sites) they are not asked to take into consideration the costs
they impose on the subjects of their regulations, and they respond to the
legislated wishes of politicians, who have neither the knowledge, nor much
of an incentive to contain costs. If an EPA scientist finds that a Superfund
site contains some concentration of dioxin, he will use the rules demanding
complete cleanup of the site (passed by Congress), regardless of whether the
dioxin has even the remotest chance of affecting human life, resulting in,
literally, billion-dollar expenses without a shred of proof that a single
human life would be saved (of course, spending a billion dollars on a
useless endeavor actually kills people by taking the resources away form
useful ones, but this is a different story). Basically, delegation of
legislative authority to bureaucratic bodies removes the feedback loop
between politician and citizen that normally constrains legislations a bit,
and replaces it with a much weaker feedback loop between politician and
bureaucrat. Bad idea.
There are some tricks one could try to solve the science-laden problems in
legislation. One is the stretchable parliament - the number of MP's selected
by lot would be adjusted to keep the number of laws per MP stable. One MP
would be assigned (perhaps in a lottery/first-come-first-serve basis) a
certain number of pages of law to read, understand and vote on (there would
have to be enough MP's to assure that each law is covered by a statistically
valid sample of all MP's), so they would only vote on stuff they really know
or like.
The other trick is to defer most decisions to insurers, with EPA-like
bureaucracies providing only the factual information (e.g. how many people
will be killed by dioxin disposed of in a certain way, versus another
method). Most of the issues addressed by EPA and OSHA are related to
identifiable harms to identifiable persons stemming from identifiable
activities of other persons. As such, they can be quantified, adjudicated by
courts and risks can be pooled by insurance. A general demand that agents in
the economy (workers, employers, organizations) purchase liability insurance
sufficient to cover all their likely liability could be made by the
legislator, and adjudicated based on the EPA-provided information by courts
using the strict liability principle. Then, independent decision-makers
would try to maximize their benefit - by finding the best balance between
expenses on dioxin remediation, avoidance of dioxin in the first place, by
adjusting insurance premiums to best convey information about the costs of
certain behaviors, etc., much more flexibly and precisely than the current
system - because the feedback loops would be between the wallets of closely
collaborating individuals, and not the global choices of millions of people
made once every four years. Some behaviors, although not illegal, would
disappear, because the cost of liability insurance associated with them
would be higher than the economic gain from them.
Rafal
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