'In Most Industries, Regulation Tends To Prevent Competition' – Slashdot

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I am sure the man in charge of a large venture capital firm invested into AI products is giving us the totally fair interpretation on regulation.
Also we already have economic theories about things like healthcare and education (and most of the things on his chart) and it’s not just regulation, it’s that these industries have limits on how much technology can increase productivity, also known as the Baumol Effect or Baumols Cost Disease [wikipedia.org]
Also one can easily make the argument (imo correctly) that almost all other developed nations regulate their healthcare systems more than the US and in fact their systems operate much cheaper, the US having the highest costs-per-capita by far. Healthcare is walking talking market failure on every level, it simply cannot operate via market principles if the goal in fact is to serve the most people and reduce the most amount of suffering.

I am sure the man in charge of a large venture capital firm invested into AI products is giving us the totally fair interpretation on regulation.
It’s not exactly a new idea, Stigler wrote about in the 70’s.

Also one can easily make the argument (imo correctly) that almost all other developed nations regulate their healthcare systems more than the US and in fact their systems operate much cheaper, the US having the highest costs-per-capita by far. Healthcare is walking talking market failure on every level, it simply cannot operate via market principles if the goal in fact is to serve the most people and reduce the most amount of suffering.
Market forces act on all systems, just with different impact. In some European countries, universal healthcare often means waiting for routine care, and in some private clinics have sprung up to provide on demand access for those that are willing to pay.healthcare reform is a complex topic, and to fix it you need to change a lot of things; from drug pricing, insurance and payment models, physician education to by whom and how care is delivered. That takes on a lot of special interests; drug companies want high drug prices in the us to support R&D, MDs want to be the gatekeepers for care, legal liability, etc.
The US is stuck in limbo. The free market capitalists believe in minimal regulation. The socialists believe in government ran health care.
What we get is a hybrid which doesn’t work. In the US, the regulations come from the same entities that are attempting to maximize profits. The incentives are wrong.
I believe the US needs two completely independent systems with their own set of providers. One exclusively paid for by the public sector and the other exclusively paid for by the private. Keep the private one
The thing with 2 independent systems is it creates a large amount of inefficiency, there are only so many health providers, doctors, clinics etc. Also medical care is very susceptible to a consumer lack of knowledge program, an unregulated doctor can sell people on wrong or unnecessary procedures for money because people are not doctors. We have a pretty much unregulated supplements industry in the US and it is functionally full of fake products with mountains of dubious claims.
What you describing is just
In Germany, it works like this: The government defines the minimum requirement for an health insurance plan and its implementation within the healthcare system. Any insurer is allowed to offer plans which cover at least this legal minimum. Those regulated contracts are called “insurances according to law”. People below a certain treshold of income are required to buy an insurance plan according to law, but are
Ahh ok are you in Germany? I have read a lot of things about the German healthcare system in that it seems like a good candidate to phase the US model over to because it does a good job of providing total coverage but still allows a private insurance option for those who want it. I believe though that the majority of insurers are also non-profit, is that correct? I think that’s a good requirement to keep the incentives aligned on good health outcomes.
This happens in the US too. I have great health care with an HMO; cheap drugs, quick access, a one stop location for everything. My mother has a medicare plan with cheap drugs too; but extremely slow responses for specialties. She can see the local doctor easily, but it’s been months to get some basic stuff done like radiology. Her doctor makes a referral and it may be a month before there’s phone call to set up an appointment.
The US media gets a lot of click bait stories about how horrific health care
For sure no country has a perfect health care system, Canada and the European countries have their issues but I think the real key though is even with those problems I don’t think anybody who lives in any of those countries would want to shift their system over to what the US does because we get the worst of both; we pay the most by a pretty large margin and it’s not like we get the outcomes, if anything life expectancy is declining in the US. We do have good cancer survival rates but its not that far ahea
A lot of US medicine is reactive, especially on the insurance sice – you get a problem first then they try to fix it. It is cheaper and more effective, when possible, to prevent the problems before they happen.
For sure for sure not enough people get regular checkups and we also suffer from delayed care.
It’s something of a non-issue in other countries but in the US I know myself and many others that when something is feeling wrong or we think it’s time to see a doctor the first thought is “how am i gonna pay for this” even with insurance.

I am sure the man in charge of a large venture capital firm … is giving us the totally fair interpretation on regulation.
That’s really all you needed to say.
I’d say it’s pretty obvious that in most cases, any regulation will reduce competition to some degree. What’s also obvious is there are better regulations and worse regulations. There are regulations that achieve a stated goal with a little impact as possible, and those that don’t even achieve their goal while massively impacting competition. We would prefer more of the former and less of the latter regulations.
The key is whether the purpose of the regulation is valuable, and whether the regulation is reaso
Absolutely, I think the conservatives/libertarians are spot on when they talk about the artificial rationing of residencies and doctors by the AMA, that is reduces supply and increases costs. Can totally agree we should uncap that but still keep requirements for doctors to be licensed appropriately.

that almost all other developed nations regulate their healthcare systems more than the US
Actually untrue in most respects. What the USA has a problem with is poor regulation though. Most other countries have regulations more focused on affordability. The US doesn’t have that.
I like to say that the US has a careful combination of the worst aspects of free market and government controlled industry.
As in, we’d be better off if the healthcare market was a more reasonably “free” market OR if it was more tightly controlled, like with a single payer healthcare system.
We’ve discovered this ourselves
The things with plastic surgery, lasik and such is that those are by their name, elective procedures. The consumer always in that case has the option to walk away and not purchase which is a key component of a competitive market, if prices are too high consumers will simply not purchase. With most healthcare that does not exist, the consumer has no real choice, nor do they have the knowledge to effectively judge their options. So many market failure options happening at once.
I would also agree on radical
Precisely. This is more telling about the mindset of a certain kind of executive (sadly not an infrequent mindset) than it is about anything economic.
In addition to the obvious product quality issues, another problem that happens in lightly regulated industries is that companies just pull out or disappear with little notice. It’s one thing if you can no longer get your favorite pair of designer jeans, and quite another if an airplane part manufacturer hangs it up.
Regulation is a blunt instrument for sure,
Most if not all of those companies were small startups when he invested.
But even if he’s biased, that doesn’t make him wrong. Judge the facts and argument, not the arguer.
The facts however don’t tell you which is the cause and which is the effect. The story is clearly trying to point towards an unsupported conclusion that regulation should be reduced.
out side the usa healthcare costs are low with reg.
But the USA has to foot the bill for others to get cheap drugs.
I can’t quite tell if you meant that ironically, but the USA could absolutely have drugs at the same price as everywhere else. There’s just this weird institutional deference to grifters and liars so if some guy raises the price of insulin, the government has nothing to say about it because someone is getting rich off of it. It’s wild.

But the USA has to foot the bill for others to get cheap drugs.
Not really. That’s good pharma propaganda though. A large portion of pharma research is done by public institutions. A large portion is done outside the USA by government funding from others? Drugs are insanely cheap to manufacture. The only difference in the USA is the regulations that allow insane pricing for drugs where companies can literally make up any price they want combined with laws that intentionally prevent competition.
Other countries negotiate pricing contracts on a national level that means ph
“the vast majority of drug development budgets are wasted on tests imposed by regulators”
I’m not sure that testing drugs thoroughly before unleashing them on the public can be characterised as a waste, but then I’m not a pharma bro.
“This is a partial explanation for why (outside of Moderna, an accident of COVID), no $40B+ market cap new biopharma company has been launched in almost 40 years.”
Not because any vaguely promising startup gets bought out by big pharma before it can get big enough to compete, then
To follow this up, look at what Texas’s “deregulation” did to electric prices – it jacked up the prices on homeowners to the tune of $28 billion over what market rates were elsewhere for electricity as a utility. [wsj.com] The wasted money goes to the middlemen and to bribes that feed the republican party. [kut.org]
Every time conservatives tout “deregulation” they prove they’re a bunch of lying scam artists.
In the US if a drug price goes up, the insurance companies will just pay the higher price while raising their own prices or cutting back elsewhere. US health insurance companies are extremely quick to deny coverage when they can. Sure, the US has the best health care, the problem is that most US residents don’t have access to it.

In fact, places like UK show that deregulation following privatization has brought price on utilities way up
The statement itself is based on facts, but it is incomplete. The issue is in most industries OVERregulation drives prices up. The opposite to overregulation is sane regulation, it’s not underregulation. The latter can also drive prices up, as in the UK.
This is Economics 101, if you increase the barrier to entry into an open market, less people will be able to enter the market. Pure genius.
We’ve only known this for a few thousands of years. The ancient greeks had already developed legal constraints, specifically on trade by their executive agencies because they saw the need for a flourishing economy and the effect of an overbearing state apparatus (whether through taxation or other means) had.

the need for a flourishing economy and the effect of an overbearing state apparatus
There’s also the opposite problem (an “underbearing” state apparatus?) where consumer confidence is rightly low and the economy needs to be fixed. An example of this is the Pure Food And Drug Act [visitthecapitol.gov] [passed by a Republican congress and signed by Theodore Roosevelt].
I don’t see the need for the predecessor to the FDA needed to exist at all.
There was sufficient public outcry from proper journalists that were doing their job, people were making choices based on the available information. The Pure Food and Drug Act encouraged rent seeking from chemical manufacturers, food producers were now required to add tons of preservatives to not come into conflict with some law (which we now know have their own problems) and allowed lower quality products to be sold at greater dista

If it weren’t for regulation would *you* let a hobo operate on your brain? Or would you, like, check into the surgeon’s background and certifications a little first?
If it weren’t for regulation, could you trust what you find when you check into that background and certifications? How do you know that the hobo didn’t buy the certification with money under the table?
> Or would you, like, check into the surgeon’s background and certifications a little first?
Yep, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing in the ambulance driving me from a car crash for an emergency brain operation following a head injury.
Right after taking care to chose the best private ambulance provider suited to my immediate needs.
The choice of police force to investigate said crash will be chosen by the least injured party of the incident.
> I mean, do you really think hobos would be operating as brain
A must-watch video is this one with Paul Janssen, one of the giants of pharma, in which he states that the vast majority of drug development budgets are wasted on tests imposed by regulators which “has little to do with actual research or actual development.”
No, they have to do with important issues like safety and efficacy. Maybe drug companies think safety and efficacy testing is a waste, but as a consumer I think it’s important the stuff I buy functions as promised and doesn’t kill me.
More generally, it’s stupid to take the word of someone from a highly regulated industry when they’re talking about the necessity of that regulation. Of course drug companies don’t like being regulated, and they’re going to complain about how pointless that regulation is. That doesn’t mean you should trust them. Naturally, they’re going to blame excessive regulation for why drugs are so expensive and not excessive profits and high executive pay.
Are you kidding? The drug companies -love- being regulated.
It’s those regulations which allow them, the holders of large purses, to remain relevant and profitable. Nobody else is allowed to compete, and they can arbitrarily raise the price of their goods due to the fact that there’s no competition/they run a regulated monopoly.
It’s the only thing to prevent people from starting competitive practices – something which would quickly happen if they didn’t have regulatory organizations which would trounce them
This has been known for 100 years, going back at least to the writing of socialist historian Gabriel Koko, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… [wikipedia.org] .
Big business uses the left as puppets to impose regulation on itself, to make life easy and keep out competitors. Regulators end up as defenders of the status quo and of the industry they regulate.
The regulation is real, and involves lots of expensive red tape that consumers pay for. But big established firms can cope with the complexity – little upstart competitors c
But many people are. Why can’t they have that choice?
Do you really trust the government’s “regulations” over third party groups – many of which have a better track record of analysis and judgement than the FDA, when it comes to healthcare?

Big business uses the left as puppets to impose regulation on itself, to make life easy and keep out competitors.
Is it really just the left? I think of business lobbying that forbids local cities from setting up broadband, for instance. Although you cited Gabriel Koko, you conveniently omitted his observation that businesses leverage right as well as left wing governments, e.g. https://reason.com/2014/05/20/… [reason.com]

“… disinfectant that clears away both liberal myths about benevolent reformers and conservative myths about independent, market-loving businessmen”
My understanding is that business aim for monopolies, and monopolies are what drive up prices, and they’ll go for them in whatever way they can — through lobbying for governments to enshrine monopolies, for go
It appears he hasn’t taken a class in American history, specifically about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In the Gilded age, unregulated pharmaceuticals wreaked havoc on society — it wasn’t just alcohol, but opium, morphine, cocaine etc available at any Woolworth’s, pharmacy, or company-town store in America (“patent medicines.”) Much of it was impure, and many patent medicines didn’t even reveal their ingredients…which were often, nasty. This brought the temperance movement, a reaction that caused alcohol to become illegal for ten years. Alcohol during this time of unregulated, bootleg production was unpalatable at best and poisonous at worst, often containing methyl alcohol or other nasty ingredients.
Lack of regulation also gave rise to monopolies such as Standard Oil. So, in short, America already learned it lessons about being fast and loose about these regulations…and the ones he’s suggesting are too regulated would surely result in lots of death if de-regulated.
There are issues of magnitude that are often ignored in these arguments. “Regulation” and “De-regulation” are somewhat meaningless terms when used alone.
For instance, onion production, for some reason, is regulated. This can cause price swings of up to 50%. The average consumer might not care if the bag of onions they buy every two weeks costs $4 instead of $3, but a fast food chain that buys hundreds of tons of onions a year cares quite a bit. De-regulating onion production would smooth out the price fluct
The health care market, AFAICT, isn’t even held to market norms like a normal, transparent schedule of labor and materials pricing. Health care providers have no fiduciary responsibility to their vulnerable patients to exercise a reasonable care in providing “best value” to their patients absent informed consent from people with Power of Attorney.
We could easily solve a lot of these problems by having special civil court rules that require a jury of professional near-peers for medical malpractice suits and
Healthcare everywhere in the western world except the USA is just as regulated, but drastically cheaper. Why? Because it is also single payer.
The same is also true of energy and the other examples given.
Exactly. The bulk of the costs has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with inefficiencies deliberately built into the system through political dogma.
…does really well, until it implodes and kills everyone. Regulation is necessary in any safety-critical system, not to appease bureaucrats as the blogger claims, but to ensure that the necessary quality controls are in place.
But let’s consider how much cost is actually added by regulation. The NHS has far more regulation than the US healthcare system, yet costs half as much. The UK also spends less on education, yet scores higher on league tables.
This evokes one of Mrs Thatcher’s more astute comments (yes, she actually got a few things right): it’s not how much you spend that matters, it’s spending it on the right things that matters.
This evokes one of Mrs Thatcher’s more astute comments (yes, she actually got a few things right): it’s not how much you spend that matters, it’s spending it on the right things that matters.
I was going to post a similar thing: it’s not the quantity of regulations that matter – it’s the nature of the regulations.
less regulated industries (clothing, software, toys) drop costs dramatically over time
Industries that get as close to slavery as you can get in modern times.
You get clothes that are produced by prisoners or people in sweatshops. Because there’s plenty of people to exploit.
You get software from companies that crunch young developers into burnouts. Fortunately for them there’s plenty of junior developers to exploit.
Same story with toys which are produced by prisoners or under terrible conditions for workers in countries where a human’s life isn’t worth a lot.

I wouldn’t use these race to the bottom industries as a good example of healthy competition that can be accomplished by lack of regulation.
Now even disregarding all the human rights things for a moment, I don’t see how such an approach would work for health care or education for example. Especially in health care where mistakes can have grave consequences.
That’s just a nice new name for corruption, even if the US has laws saying some forms of corruption is A-OK.
Entering the market where there is regulation isn’t as hard as the author suggests, nor is it hard just because of regulation.
Try entering the search engine market. You’d have to spend a LOT of money, even though it’s not a highly regulated sector. Why? Because it’s always hard to enter a market where there is a single dominant player. If the government starts to regulate search, as they are starting to attempt to do, it will make it easier, not harder, for new players to enter the market.
The bigger, more politically connected companies are the ones who are writing the regulations and they tailor it such that small companies can’t afford the manpower, legal team, and lobbyists to comply with the regulations and still be able to compete. In addition, criteria such as past-experience also shuts out newcomers. This is historically true. You need only look at the CAB bill which was written by Juan Tripp and Pan Am to ensure that they were the only airline that could fly internationally. It took
I was going to skip this one until I read the other responses. It it is *axiomatic* that the cost rises with regulation, why does any grown-up adult ever imagine otherwise. I am startled (although not surprised) that people need this explained to them.
Also….WHAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
On a few of his points, he’s right. Regulation for the nuclear industry for example has stifled perhaps the single biggest opportunity we had to get off of coal or natural gas. In healthcare, his examples are not wrong. Regulation, and specifically not the FDA but t
I have been in the room when it was asked by our CEO “What additional regulations can we propose that will create enough paperwork so our competitors have to leave this line of business?”
Working groups were formed and it was determined that a combination of reporting and auditing requirements would create enough work that a competitor would have to hire another 14 people and we could absorb that easily.
CEO appears before the relevant government committee wringing his hands about “safety” and the regulation
Lots of bad reasoning.
First, healthcare is not highly regulated, at least in the US. In the US, healthcare is loosely regulated relative to other developed countries. One reason for this lax regulation is that the amount of regulation often sparks ideological battles.
Second, the correlation between the amount of regulation and the resultant level of competition cannot be studied across different markets without considering how a different level of regulation would affect competition. Healthcare is inhere
Also the regulation is necessary. The days of pre-regulation pharmacology was not a good time. Lack of regulation may encourage some competititon, but it greatly encourages the low quality competition, the scammers, the snake oil sales, etc.
You see this in the unregulated “supplements” industry, there are so many products online that have “proprietary formulas” where you cannot see the list of ingredients and which essentially are higher priced variants of common supplements found on local shelves that do

The days of pre-regulation pharmacology was not a good time
Pffft, says the man who’s never gone to his local Walgreens to purchase a bottle of cocaine. 😉
Yes, that actually used to be a thing.
Well, Children’s Heroin was actually an excellent cough syrup so. There just might have been some undesirable uses for it.
Also, the chart shows cars and public transport as “less regulated.” Really? Those two sectors are heavily regulated. I’m not sure the chart shows such a clean correlation between regulation and prices.
The whole assertion is pretty bizarre. Children’s toys, not regulated? And what industry is “not regulated” when customers can sue?
The 3 examples, healthcare, education, and energy are all necessities.
Each of these areas would deserve their own entire discussion. I would say it is a legitimate point that regulation limits competition, But the support given for that point is awful.
Also, Sometimes regulation serves to deliberately restrict competition in the short term in order to make a service available at all: Which companies might not take the risk to offer in the first place, otherwise. Sometimes the lowest End consumer price
I’m going to start out by saying that you are 95% CORRECT.
The cost of regulation though often exceeds the financial loss that occurred from the originating “accident”.
I call it the “something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done” mentality, where nobody questions the premise because it might offend someone.
I’ll give you a recent example from my life, the Tire Pressure Monitoring System in all vehicles. The cost of installing and servicing of faulty or failed TPMS, exceeds the actual co
repair costs done at a shop, like most people might do.

I’ll give you a recent example from my life, the Tire Pressure Monitoring System in all vehicles. The cost of installing and servicing of faulty or failed TPMS, exceeds the actual costs associated with a low pressure tire (not a blowout) tire based accidents. There are four tires, each with its own sensor that can (and eventually will) fail. The COST to fix said sensor is approximately $80 plus installation PER tire, when they eventually fail. It is now a profit center for Tire shops. This is not a repair the average home mechanic can perform, since it requires pulling the tire from the rim and rebalancing the tire upon completion.
The cost likely exceeds the damages (both human / vehicle) the sensor is designed to prevent. And there are now MILLIONS of vehicles that have the TPMS sensor fault light illuminated on their dash, which nullifies any further warnings that might be legit. The sensors fail between 5-10 years.
The really sad part of all of this was a good enough solution of a few lines of code to use ABS sensors to detect the condition was basically free.
Without regulation, the chances of the money being put into actual education versus, say, Creationist textbooks, is also zero. Politics, not educational requirements, drives schools and you need regulation to counter the effects of toxic politics.
However, as America amply demonstrates (by being so far down the league tables), poorly-crafted regulation doesn’t help either.
As I see it, it’s not the volume of regulation that drives up costs, but the volume of poorly-thought-out political and religious dogma.
Let’s take healthcare. If the US switched to the UK model, they’d halve costs. 50% of the cost has NOTHING to do with regulation and everything to do with dogma.
I think your first example is a terrible one. It’s precisely because education is organized by political entities that a minority view can be enforced on the majority. Consumers in a market choose what they consider to be the best option, while receivers of government servicers receive what others think is the best option.
Creationist textbooks (or critical race theory textbooks) are pushed on public school students because a small, but passionate, minority lobbies hard to make it that way and others are e

Let’s take healthcare. If the US switched to the UK model, they’d halve costs. 50% of the cost has NOTHING to do with regulation and everything to do with dogma.
The cost of US healthcare is not all because of insurance companies getting rich off everyone else. It also has to do with laws surrounding medical malpractice. In the U.S. there is no limit to how much a patient will receive from a physician’s insurance or a hospital should there be any negligence. As a result, physicians will order unnecessary tests (which, funnily enough, healthcare insurance companies are starting to reject more and more) to cover their ass in-case-shit. The hospitals will also go a
>>The cost of US healthcare is not all because of insurance companies getting rich off everyone else.
oh really?
Health insurance companies make record profits as costs soar in US [live5news.com]
For UnitedHealth, the largest insurer in the U.S., net earnings have surged since 2015, reaching $17.7 billion last year as their business has rapidly expanded into other healthcare sectors.
“(Companies are) not bringing down the cost of care and not giving people relief from premiums and out pockets, but enriching their s
I’ve often heard Americans talk about health care and the free market. But the problem with that is that health care is not a commodity or a normal good, especially in regards to doctors and hospitals. Medical attention is not something people want gratuitously (usually). It’s something we want to buy as little of as possible until we get very sick or old and then we not only need it, but need it very suddenly and usually need lots of it for an extended period of time. It’s not like commodities such as fo
It’s not anti-Christian to oppose the teaching of creationism in biology class. If you want to teach it, do it in theology class, people (myself included) would object a lot less to the notion.
If you really want to die on the whole religion in schools thing, I hope you’re equally willing to do it for the Muslim kid that wants to perform the Salat. Of course, we both know it’s not about religious freedom, which has never seriously been under threat in the United States. It’s actually about Christian Nationalism. The Salat is a good way to shut up Christian Nationalists though.
“Do you believe prayer in schools should be allowed?”
“Absolutely! Five times a day, facing Mecca. Next question?”
We went through Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism. In 4th Grade. It took about six weeks if memory serves. I remember hating it, I wanted to get back to history and politics, those were my areas of strength in social studies, but I got through it and hated it less than algebra, lol.
We didn’t do the rest. I’m not really sure who determined what would be covered. It is reasonable to say at a certain point something is probably too niche to require a deep dive in primary education. By number of
“anti-creationists” as you put it, have a theory, which is based on observation, and analysis and that can change over time with the addition of new information
It is called The Scientific Method [wikipedia.org], look it up
“creationists” on the other hand, are relying on BELIEF in texts written centuries ago, and translated between a dozen or so languages
It leads to Holy Wars and needless suffering [wikipedia.org], look it up
Many would say that your children have the right to a well rounded education so they can make informed decisions for themselves when they come of age. They aren’t your slaves you know. They’re sentient beings with the same right to self-determination that you have. You can certainly shape them, nobody mainstream wants to take that away from you, but you don’t have the right to shelter them from basic facts. That’s no different than what the Taliban does with the female population.
Is your belief in yo
It ain’t even criticism of Christianity. You can and arguably should learn about Christianity’s creation myth in public school. It’s the world’s largest religion. It’d be pretty stupid not to cover the basics in primary education. Even a committed atheist should understand the basic beliefs of a religion with two billion plus followers. People just object to it being shoved into the biology/science curricula. It belongs in theology class or possibly social studies if theology is too niche for primary
I remember that my public school covered the faiths and religions in Social Studies, not Science
Both of my parents were teachers, and the closes that they came to creationism was to say, “how do you know how long one of God’s days were”. basically throwing the literal interpretation of the bible under the bus in favor for scientific time frames
It amuses me how little many modern day Christians actually know about their their own faith. Their faith was never about a strict dogmatic following of text. The stories weren’t even written down in the beginning. They were passed down orally. From the outset Christianity was flexible. If it wasn’t it would have died out a long time ago. It started as a doomsday cult that thought the end times were coming (sound familiar? [wikipedia.org]). Early Christians filtered various current events, like the First Jewish Revo
I have used ‘be not like the hypocrites…” more than once and have found it to be effective
There is no constitutional mandate, – which does not mean there is not a constitutional justification.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States…”
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3: (the Commerce Clause), since educational materials (such as textbooks sold across the country) and distance education cross state borders on a regular commercia
You forgot: “The Congress shall have Power To … fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”
DoE’s “coercion” power is limited to the withholding of Federal funds. Strictly speaking, it cannot compel a school district to do a damn thing. If some locality is hell bent on defying whatever rule DoE is trying to impose all they need to do is raise property taxes enough to offset the lost Federal revenue and/or accept having less money.
People might also contemplate that employers tend to consider the educational attainment of the local populace when determining where to build new plants or expand existing ones. All other things being equal, if you had a large sum of CapEx to spend, would you invest it in the community where half the population dropped out of high school or the one where an above average percentage has undergraduate degrees?
Which brings me to my idea, an Open Source / Creative Commons / Public Domain Textbooks, which are not controlled by a publisher or cartel of government sponsored (and approved) publishers.
One REALLY big meta-enabled textbook created and shared by everyone, which can be tailored to every state’s requirement (via metadata) that is open to review by EVERYONE and expanded and enhanced by everyone equally.
That way, we have books that can appease every liberal, progressive, conservative, libertarian, socialist,

First off, the interstate commerce clause is one of the most abused clauses in the constitution so way to pick that one. So let me get this straight, because educational books can cross state lines because because not every state has publishers that you believe the Federal government has been granted the right to oversee the educational system.
It does make sense. After all the commerce clause is also why the DoT (Department of Toiletries) exists to regulate trade of toilet paper across state lines in accordance with enabling constitutional mandate “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;”
Just a heads up, DoE is normally the Department of Energy [energy.gov]
Department of Education came later and is known as “ED” [usa.gov].
As for the article itself, this is why while I support SOME regulation, I support keeping it as minimal as practical, with regular reviews to clean stuff up.
I mean, I used to live in a town that still banned Indians(as in Native Americans) from public facilities… They hadn’t done a good review in like forever.

Do you want unlicensed and unregulated medical practitioners, for example?
The benefits of regulation are actually pretty substantial.
I personally would love a system that replaced regulation with some way for customers to obtain accurate information about a practitioners qualifications and outcomes related to past patients in their care. Just let real world outcomes dominate decision making.
Current state of affairs in the US is that tens of thousands of people die yearly due to insane medical costs while at the same time the medical industry causes additional deaths of a quarter million people due to various avoidable medical errors.
The

Do you want unlicensed and unregulated medical practitioners, for example?
Yes.
Yes I do very much want unlicensed medical practitioners.
But “unregulated” is a poorly-defined and politically-loaded word. Even without explicit specific “regulation”, the entirety of the law applies to everyone at all times. If someone defrauds you, acts with negligence or malice, violates a contract for services, etc. those things are already subject to legal consequences.
I want bodega nurses, I want medical technicians in RVs who drive around providing various services, I want Physical Thera
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