When someone reports a software bug to you, do you often ask them if the solution is to abandon the entire product? This doesn't seem like a productive methodology.
No, that's why I phrased my comment as a question. When the implementation difficulties of regulation come up on libertarian-leaning forums, it often seems like it's really an indirect way of arguing against the whole concept and practice of regulation (e.g. like this comment describes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19424511). I just wanted to see if that was the case here or not, hence the question.
Libertarians probably don't often advocate the strawman position of no regulation whatsoever, or the ill-defined yet ludicrous "self regulation", but rather independent regulation by third-party companies, such as is the case in the kosher food certification industry, or the Underwriters Laboratories, or PCI compliance.
> position of no regulation whatsoever, or the ill-defined yet ludicrous "self regulation", but rather independent regulation by third-party companies
I think these positions are essentially the same, at least in the case of most consumer-facing regulation. The latter would cause a myriad of captive "independent regulatory" bodies to emerge to confuse consumers, complete with slick websites and easy to confuse names and logos (or outright fraudulent ones). It would be hard to sort through them, and no one will have the time to do it.
Kosher labeling seems to work decently, even though "nobody has the time" to figure out what any of the logos mean.
Meanwhile, evidently "nobody has the time" for knocking on enough congressmen's doors to override Big Business' billion-dollar lobbying efforts, and so here we are watching planes fall from the sky.
> Kosher labeling seems to work decently, even though "nobody has the time" to figure out what any of the logos mean.
Mainly because it relies on government regulation to function, namely trademark law. It's also probably a fairly unique case, since I doubt there's a ton of money in kosher food production (meaning the payoff for abusing the system is low), and the people who care about keeping kosher care about it a lot and can focus on it due to the presence of other regulation.
