Meep wrote:I find the enthusiasm for "getting rid of red tape" being one of the "good" things about Brexit kind of disturbing. For example, one of the moronic leave campaigns talked about how the EU had rules around the manufacture of pillows, however they did not suggest how many rules for pillow manufacture they thought would be appropriate or which ones in particular they would do away with. The idea that something like a pillow should be manufactured without regulations is unnerving because that poses a severe risk to human health if it is made from the wrong materials. Some idiots seem to think that no one would knowingly put something harmful in a pillow and having rules around them is nonsense, which is incredibly naive.
Think about Grenfell and the company that manufactured cladding made from flammable plastic. Their engineers would have known this substance was flammable, but it provided a good profit margin and was perfectly legal to manufacture so their managers must have ignored these facts and ordered the product to go ahead. The underlying motivation of enterprise is the accumulation of capital and nothing else. If companies were at all motivated by protecting public health the entire tobacco industry would have closed shop decades ago. This is the uncomfortable truth that free market enthusiasts never want to admit. In a capitalist system businesses operates in the manner of a psychopath and if you let them they will throw innocents under a bus the first time its convenient.
To conclude, yes, we do need regulations for manufacturing pillows. Unless you want to breath in carcinogenic fibres of other nasties things while you sleep. A lot of the red tape these would be captains of industry are moaning about is there to protect all the boring little people they would not care less about, with their boring petty concerns about "health and safety" (aka, "life and death").
Oh yeah? Well let me ask you this, how many people died of cancer or had diabetes in the Victorian era? Exactly! Probably not a lot, and I'm 100% sure it was all because of the lead/cyanide/formaldehyde in their medication/makeup/desserts. But of course big government just wants to poison us and kill us so they invented health and safety regulations saying we can't have ice cream full of poison because they hate freedom.
Seriously though these people are absolute idiots. The people of the past worked so hard to win these most basic of safety regulations so that they wouldn't lose yet another finger/hand/appendage in some machine and morons who have never worked in a factory complain endlessly about how they make us noncompetitive. Yes, we may be non-competitive against places that use child labour/have no standards but that doesn't mean we need to go backwards you absolute idiot.