> a doctor may be liable to a patient for not conforming to accepted standards of medical practice. But no writing exists that completely defines what those standards are!

It seems like an "accepted standard of medical practice" is therefore a matter of opinion, meaning you could find two professional witnesses who reasonably disagreed.

But much of the building codes are hard requirements - you're never going to be able to find a professional opinion that running a 20A residential circuit on 14AWG Romex is acceptable, even if say it's only in an uninsulated wall and is therefore likely safe.

So the two are completely different. Likely in the medical field, ambiguously policing those who stray too far from the herd is the best that can be done. But in disciplines with hard engineering rules, we can do better.

> As a practical matter, the folks charged with following the laws in question are builders

Erm, what? That's somewhat like saying the only people tasked with following traffic laws are drivers. Well sure, but in that sense we're basically all drivers.

Or if you mean that imply that only professional commercial builders are bound by those laws, that is definitively incorrect. People doing their own work are still bound by the law, even in the ridiculous nanny states that attempt to criminalize people working on their own home.

The law is a pragmatic tool to solve problems. Building codes solve a concrete problem with the market for construction: there is an immense information asymmetry between the original builder and subsequent buyers. Moreover, there are externalities because, e.g., inferior construction of one person's property can cause fire to spread to other peoples' property.

The existing model solves the problem and shoves most of the costs of doing so on builders--the parties best equipped to deal with the problem. That makes it a reasonable solution.

Your driving analogy fails because almost nobody builds their own house. Imagine instead that almost everyone rides in self-driving cars. Under those circumstances, would it really be unreasonable for the law to incorporate traffic regulations developed by the industry and optimized for automated cars?

But as I said elsewhere, it only functions if people believe in it ideologically. If a store relied solely on punishment for shoplifting as deterrent, they would need to hire many more security guards to watch every single customer. What they actually rely on is the average person's belief that stealing is "wrong", because said average person does not want to be stolen from themselves.

> Your driving analogy fails because almost nobody builds their own house

It's not only the initial building of a house, it's about any maintenance, repair, or upgrades. Knowing how to keep up your dwelling is a basic life skill. You may find it economically beneficial to pay someone else to do the actual work, but that doesn't alleviate your ultimate responsibility for managing it.

If you want an illustration of how many people DIY versus pay a tradesperson, take a look at the popularity and selection of consumer-facing stores like Home Depot versus professional-only "counter service". Granted, most of these people would be happier reading a distilled "code complete" book rather than the dense NEC. And many more of them will proceed to, for example, swap a lamp on their own without reading anything at all! But they should still be given that choice openly and have access to the actual law nonetheless.

The ideological justification for the rule of law is not necessarily opposed to it also being a pragmatic tool for the powerful.

One of the best ways to understand the legal system is as a tool for elites to secure their privileges and avoid violent confrontations over who gets those privileges.

The common person needs to believe that they too are protected through the legal system, and so it is worth following the rules and forcing others to follow the rules. This is what makes it a Schelling point.

As an aside, the "drug war" has helped destroy this belief, especially harshest for minority communities. This has resulted in social breakdown and creation of movements like "stop snitching" and Black Lives Matter.

There's a very cogent argument about the development of laws as a way for elites to pragmatically secure their prerogatives, historically, by North, Wallis, and Weingast. Their book is "Violence and Social Orders" and there's a good paper on it here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12795

So what? Being public is not the same as being in writing; you could have doctors responsible for answering questions from the citizenry, for example.

And they're the ones who pay for the standardization process by purchasing copies of the standards.

And why couldn't it just be an extra fee added to the license required to do construction work?

But if you re-do you own home wiring, you effectively become a "builder". And you probably aren't a member of that industry organization.

The real problem is here is that two things are being commingled that should not be. Something that is inherently "public" - the law, and something inherently private - codes developed by industry standards. The real solution is to stop doing this "incorporation by reference" altogether. But if we are going to incorporate, it makes no sense to treat this chunk of law as different from the rest.

But what fraction of people do that? That's my point--ideologically I agree with you. But I don't think you can take what is basically a corner case in the legal regime and point to that and say it's an unreasonable tool for the elite to use the law to oppress the weak.

I don't buy your "public/private" dichotomy at all. The government should defer to the expertise of private industry when necessary. The small potential for abuse (and there is no evidence that the standards bodies here are abusing their position), does not justify imposing laws on everybody designed by government bureaucrats acting outside their area of expertise.

I guess we don't disagree too much then. FWIW, I'm not saying anything about "the elite oppressing the weak" - at least not in this context. To me this really is just a matter of principle.

The government should defer to the expertise of private industry when necessary. The small potential for abuse (and there is no evidence that the standards bodies here are abusing their position), does not justify imposing laws on everybody designed by government bureaucrats acting outside their area of expertise.

This is why I'd prefer to get the government out of this altogether. But, then again, I'm a Libertarian, so I want the government out of pretty much everything altogether. :-)