Regulatory capture is a different beast from actual regulation. It is what happens when corporations get to stack the government No. You do not understand the

Regulatory capture is a different beast from actual regulation. It is what happens when corporations get to stack the government No. You do not understand the concept. Regulatory capture can happen even with the purest of intentions. The problem is that for effective regulation, you need experts. Where are you going to get experts, if not people who have experience in the industry? The problem with this is not that they may try to corrupt the process, favoring their former employer or whatever (although that is also a potential problem, but that's outright corruption, not "regulatory capture"). The thing about people from the industry is that they have a set way of looking at things - they're going to have a hard time "thinking outside the box", and because of the very fact that they spent so much time gathering their expertise, they're going to have a world view in which that area is more important than it probably is to the rest of us. With people that are used to thinking about the system in a set way, and who think it's more important relatively than other things, the flavor of the output regulations is going to tend to be to reinforce the way the industry does things, you'll rarely get something that really pulls the industry out of problematic ruts. From what I've read, the Navy actually recognizes this problem in their nuclear fleet, and so refuses to use nuclear experts from the power generation industry. Being the Navy, they can afford to train their own experts, but this obviously can't scale to every place in our lives where regulation shows its face.