Regulatory Bias
Restaurants are held to a higher standards of food preparation than individuals. Few rules constrain your holiday meal for twenty, but if you served ten folks for lunch in a tiny diner, a huge rule book applies.
In Europe, firms are also held to a higher privacy standards than individuals. Firms must be careful to store your emails to them very carefully, to ensure a very low risk they might be stolen. But individuals can be very sloppy in how they store emails.
There are many such apparent regulatory “biases,” i.e., ways that regulations hold some things to higher standards than others, even when the relevant consequences seem similar. For example we seem to prefer:
Individuals over firms
Non-money over money exchange.
Natural over artificial chemicals
Old over new practices
Human over machine control
Locals over foreigners
Non- over for-profit organizations.
What else?
Now I’m sure clever folks can think up justifications for such preferences. But as with the common preference to redistribute money but not grades, I expect few folks could quickly come up with those reasons, even though most embrace such preferences. This again suggests that the clever reasons some can offer are not the main reasons most folks support such biases. And the obvious reasons that might drive most folks to support such biases do not suggest these are biases worth keeping.
In some sense, the gov’t – though liability laws – already regulates your kitchen (albeit ex post): If I attend a dinner party at your house, and you negligently kill me with tainted food, a lawsuit may be forthcoming.
People know this, of course, and are careful to take precautions to reduce liability, e.g., you don’t serve Tommy peanuts at a dinner part if you know he has a severe peanut allergy.
Although the gov’t can’t regulate all private kitchens in all households all the time – that would be practically infeasible, or else it would! – it regulates the matter ex post through liability laws.
Now I’m sure clever folks can think up justifications for such preferences. But as with the common preference to redistribute money but not grades, I expect few folks could quickly come up with those reasons, even though most embrace such preferences. This again suggests that the clever reasons some can offer are not the main reasons most folks support such biases. And the obvious reasons that might drive most folks to support such biases do not suggest these are biases worth keeping.
That just may be due to the difficulty of articulation and reasoning. When you ask "Why?", that starts down a path that most people haven't thought out. I think it's a basic trust issue. Virtually everyone has eaten at an unknown restaurant. Regulation, perhaps like branding or standards building, provides a means for people to build trust in certain activities or products.
Turn the question into a choice. Would the person rather eat at a restaurant where no standard of quality or safety exists (beyond whatever brief inspection the customer takes upon entering the place) versus one with regulation enforcing quality and safety? I think most people would rather eat at the place where regulations could close it down, if the restaurant became dangerous enough.