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What if your product never gets built, because you are unwilling/unable to navigate the legal and regulatory barriers that have been set up to keep you out? No

• w9r09eridlk 8y ago
  This is the one thing about the article that is a little off or misleading from my experience (which appropriately is in health care). When you have this rent-seeking, it not only encourages unproductive business, but shuts down good ideas that would have worked if they were implementable. The article seems to approach the problem as if there's these entrepreneurs sitting around trying to decide what to do, and then put their energy into unproductive but incentivized rent-seeking. I'm sure that happens, but just as often in my experience there are people who are in the right position to pursue good ideas, but are shut down, turned away, or whatever, because of the rent-seeking arrangements and regulation. I also think this rent-seeking subtly influences perceptions of the public at large in such a way that ideas get scoffed at or go under the radar. It alters peoples' whole perspective on things, such that they never question the basic assumption of why the rent-seeking arrangement needs to be to begin with. This, in turn, can have consequences for how certain problems and solutions are approached.
• ethn 8y ago
  You're right that there are some regulations which make it artificially costly, but that doesn't disagree with what I'm saying.