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Yvain comments on Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky @ Cato Unbound - Less Wrong
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If I had to come up with a cognitive science explanation for pro-regulation, regardless of political considerations around whether regulation was good or bad, it would be that failures from too little regulation are obvious, direct, and heartrending (child dies of toxic unproven medicine) and failures from too much regulation are distributed and invisible (child dies of cancer, with no one knowing that a cure sits in a lab somewhere but it's too expensive to license it).
This is because regulation, as a specific action taken to stop a problem, gets to optimize for fighting the most obvious, scary problems in the most direct way - whereas nonregulation, as a null action, doesn't get to optimize for that at all.
This is the "seen and unseen" reasoning from my original comment, but something more seems to be going on with regulation. Why are people more quick to point out corruption in a corporation than in a government? Or am I just wrong about this fact? Maybe the seen and unseen reasoning explains the difference in this particular context and in other contexts there is no difference.
Right now, Virginia is regulating abortion clinics, making them meet hospital standards, in order to protect womens' safety. Yet I don't think there are any known cases of failures from too little regulation in Virginia abortion clinics. At least, I haven't heard any brought up.
Abortion is not a good example to use here since it is often overregulated intentionally by politicians who oppose abortion and want to make abortions harder to get. There is no bias to explain because the policy fits their goal of restricting abortion.
Do you mean no cases of failure from too little regulation that couldn't have been solved more cleverly by nonregulatory means, no cases of failure where the "solving" regulation didn't have problems of its own, or just that you literally can't think of any any cases ever of failures from too little regulation?
If you really mean the last, then avoiding modern-day issues so we don't get into a fight, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, thalidomide babies, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill seem like go-to historical examples.
I mean that I haven't heard anybody in the debate say, "Person X went to an abortion clinic in Virginia, and something bad happened that would have been prevented by these rules." So the impulse to regulate isn't due just to the easy availability of instances of under-regulation over instances of over-regulation.
Presumably "Person X went to an abortion clinic in Virginia, and an abortion happened" fits the bill for a lot of participants in that debate.
There was a pretty notorious case of a bad abortion clinic in Philadelphia: http://healthland.time.com/2011/01/21/philly-abortion-horrors-what-matters-is-how-and-not-when-an-abortion-is-done-says-expert/
Whether the proposed regulation could help prevent similar cases in VA, I have no idea, but if it means more oversight, you know, it seems plausible.