Thanks for that article.

It's however difficult to explain the diffierence between regulations that facilitate trade, and those which encumber it unnecessarily.

You mention industry standards as being to promote trade and social benefit. This became most evident during the industrial revolution when people started making machine parts in high volume; most significantly in the manufacture of firearms. Not only was it necessary for screws and nuts to fit when made by different people, the variation in manufactured dimensions of parts that fit together had to be held within a certain range so that the machine woulkd work properly and reliably.

What used to drive the setting of standards were the needs of the buyer. The buyer was generally aware of the standards which applied to what they were buying, although the end user of consumer goods wasn't often au fait with the details. (Read the "nameplate" on any electronic appliance for example.) The retailer, wholesaler, importer, manufacturer accept responsibility for ensuring that the goods meet the standards set as a requirement in law; which is not in general result in the meeting of the needs of the consumer; except in the case of pure luck or the consumer being able to apply non-conflicting requirements on the product selection.

Governments make standards into regulations, "anticipating" the needs of consumers. Which is where the process goes awry; largely because governments "know better". Thus the banning of 98%-efficient heating elements in Australia and the EU because they don't put out enough light and are therefore insufficiently efficient. ;-)

People who write standards can become as deluded as governments in drafting requirements to meet standards. vis the size of side-mirrors on cars. Manufacturers have been trying to make them as small as the customer will accept in order to minimise aerodynamic drag, which pays off in reduced fuel consumption for the customer and reduced emissions for society. Those who drafted the standard didn't define (just) the required performance of the device; i.e. what a driver should be able to see, within limits of distortion; they instead regulated the size of the mirror. And suddenly, small cars got about 100 mm wider, to meet the dimensional requirement.

In a world where consumers are sufficiently educated, they can make their own choices about which products standards are important to them as individuals. Producers and sellers then need to inform customers as to which standards a particular product meets. The prerequisite of an informed, educated consumer is one that Farage doesn't mention; even though the dumbing-down of the population by government imposing its choices over the consumers' provides ammunition for rhetoric that could find resonance in those who dare listen.

Reasonable people choose to fly in ultra-light aircraft that would never meet the requirements of a commercial airliner. Those reasonable people are consumers educated in a product's standards. Governments place restrictions on the airspace that the ultra-lights may use to minimise the chance of conflicts with both other aircraft and the larger community.

The other obstacle to free trade is that of duties, tariffs, quotas, etc. on the import of standards-compliant goods. Something you didn't mention. And it's what many people think of as being the only restrictions to free trade.

Very good points and absolutely on target. Such regulation belongs to the set of law that controls but also to the set of law that protects. Such regulation not only protects trade, but the public too.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is a good example: it publishes a standard, the IATA Dangerous Goods Regulations for the safe shipping by air of hazardous materials. It specifies the classification, identification, quantities, packaging, labeling, documentation and marking for air transport of substances that may be poisonous, flammable or otherwise hazardous. Compliance with the regulations is expensive as it requires everyone involved in shipping, from the clerks who prepare the paperwork to the chemists and engineers who perform the classification and identification of the substances and levels of hazard, to be trained and certified. It requires the use of specially graded, tested and certified packing materials and systems.

For instance, a flammable liquid of given vapor pressure and flashpoint might be classified such that, for a given quantity, an inner glass container (with sufficient ullage), sealed with a tight cap and secured with a stretched length of heavy vinyl tape, packed inside a closed plastic bag inside a steel can with sufficient absorbent material inside said plastic bag as to prevent shifting of said glass container during shipping, and said steel can closed with a tight lid and secured with a locking ring and said steel can then placed in a an outer container of certified fiberboard box of sufficiently high grade designed to hold said steel can securely during shipping, and where each and every component of the packaging system and said packaging system as a whole has been certified to pass required drop tests and to pass other required testing, said flammable liquid could be packaged accordingly and, with the right documentation, labeling and markings, said flamable liquid could be accepted for shipment.

Sounds intrusive? Sounds expensive? Sounds controlling? Well, yes. It actually is. Does it inhibit commerce? Well, no: not for serious entities. Serious entities will do what it takes to comply with the regulations to support their research, testing and manufacturing needs.

By the way, compliance with the regulations confers no immunity. The shipper and the carrier are still liable for whatever accidents occur and any clean-up costs. The regulations are tightly enforced: even a single typographic error on shipping documentation can bring down the weight of the regulatory bureaucracy. (I know from personal experience.) This is not wrong. The safety of the public depends on it. Therefore to comply with express regulations and to practice an additional abundance of caution are a minimum standard of conduct where public safety is concerned. To fall short of this standard is to hazard the chance of being legally and morally culpable of murder.

Think about it next time you board a plane: it probably caries a good deal of cargo, and almost assuredly, some of that cargo is, in some form or another, hazardous. I think that you will appreciate all the care and concern and conscientious practice that has gone into ensuring your safety. That it is regulated and enforced is necessary, not evil.

When Patrick Henry famously said, “Give me Liberty, or give me death,”! I think that what he meant was “I want real liberty, but I don’t want to die for silly reasons.”

On the other hand, regulations can be odious and can inhibit commerce without providing any protections to the public. In fact they can be highly adverse to the interests of the public. In the past, IATA has been involved in a legally mandated practice of price fixing. Some regulations added by certain specific countries (I am not pointing fingers, so I specifically state that I am not referring to Canada or Norway) and certain specific carriers are due more to regulatory zeal than to insight.

The conclusion is that not all regulation is good, and not all is bad. The IATA Dangerous Goods Regulations have a long history, and if you compare them to the US Department of Transportation (DoT) regulations, there is a lot of identical verbage.

It’s not all good, and it’s not all bad. It’s where we are and it gives us a place to work from.

Edited by user 22 September 2012 06:54:49(UTC)  | Reason: Fix rhetorical errors in first paragraph

One uses such tools as are available.

Yeah ... but only a bad workman blames his tools.

A free trade area needs a lot of legislation, because it is an agreement that can be taken advantage of and manipulated. But we do not have an issue with trade. Trade is 100% necessary for our very existence. What we have a problem with is a supranational government legislating on ever more areas of our lives, which honestly it has no right to and our politicians had no right to give away or move to other governmental institutions. If a law is to apply to a person, he must have the ability to disapply it if necessary within the polity of his choice. Our polity was and is the UK. It is ours, not our politicians. Politicians have no right the change the boundaries of a polity wioth the express consent of its owners. They have done so, without our consent. The Harrogate Agenda could be groundbreaking. We have actually had declarations of sovereignty of the British people before in the Act of Settlement 1705. So item one, demanding the crown and parliament recognise our superior sovereignty is nothing new. I guess a reaffimration cannot be bad, but it depends on how it is recorded. An Act of parliament is not enough as we have already had these. The Declaration of Right is hardly hung up on people's walls throughout the land. We need a document people feel ownership of.

Poster

Welcome to the forum and thank you.

This is a fascinating area ... there is certainly unanimity amongst the posters here that standards are needed. How far they need to be legislative standards is moot. Certainly, they need to be underwritten by law, although civil law can be used as well as criminal law.

One of the underlying issues here, of course, is the way the EU has hijacked trade law as a means of promoting political integration, so one of the important requirements, in arranging our exit from the EU, it to detach the corpus of standards and trade agreements from the community acquis. The trouble is that, as long as the EU has ownership of it, leaving the EU detaches us from these tools of trade, to our considerable disadvantage.

This, to my mind, is one of the greatest challenges confronting the "outers" for, unless we are able to provide the standards, etc., infrastructure, we will always have the business sector opposing withdrawal.

Tactically, the best option - in my view - is to give the corporates their "single market", by adopting membership of the EEA, and then repair it at leisure through UNECE and other quasi-regulatory bodies. Thus "parked" , the perceived disadvantage of withdrawal is then neutralised, allowing us to focus on the benefit of removing intra-community provisions from the internal (UK) market. That would benefit hugely many small traders, which should translate into a substantial number of votes in a referendum.

Tactically, it is important to distinguish between hot-gas turbine blades (which have very a limited number of well-qualified suppliers and cost many thousands of dollars per article and target a very narrow market), and articles of commerce (such as bananas) that are relatively inexpensive but consumed by the populace at large.

These are different competitive environments, with different qualifications and different measures of success.

That all seems very reasonable. Thank you.

Arguably, less hostile. The EU seems to have a genius for picking a fight with its "trading partners", viz the Airbus-Boeing fracas and the dust-up with the Chinese over aircraft emissions. It would be nice for a change to manage our own relations instead of being handmaiden to the "colleagues".