Originally Posted by
WHBM
You can actually find this increasingly with government Regulatory Authorities, in various countries, and with other regulators/augitors, eg for the finance industry.
Time was when the regulators were quite independent, and looked at things with true external oversight. They would need the knowledgeable personnel to work through everything. Then it slowly occurred to them that they might get the industry they were regulating to do certain of their jobs for them....<SNIP>
Yes, except that this was not something that "slowly occurred" to the regulators: it was a deliberate political decision for "light-handed regulation" and self-regulation, taken throughout Anglophonia, in the belief that the market would ensure that the regulated entities would want to keep their good reputation (for commercial reasons), and so could attend to the material aspects of regulation, without being stifled by "bureaucratic inertia." We now see the costs, in many industries, in lives that would not have been lost under the old regime.