4 ms·
If the only choices you can come up with are to make better services or to eliminate competition through regulation, you aren't being very creative. Corporation
by jimrandomh 16y ago
If the only choices you can come up with are to make better services or to eliminate competition through regulation, you aren't being very creative. Corporations can, and do, eliminate competition with buyouts, with deliberate incompatibility, with exclusivity contracts, with spies and sabotage, and with a wide variety other creative, subtle, and sometimes unethical strategies.
- iwwr 16y agoMore often than not, the regulatory agencies become captured by the very businesses they are regulating.
- ible 16y agoI've been seeing similar comments to this around recently and I've been trying to identify the argument behind it. My best effort is something like: 1) Businesses will act in their economic self-interest to capture regulations/regulators. This is done to leverage the power of the state for themselves. 2) This capture is a bad thing, presumably due to net harm it causes to other business/customers/individuals/freedom. 3) Absent regulation businesses will not be able to (or be less able to) bend the power of the state to their own economic interests and will have to use other tactics. 4) Those other tactics are less harmful (or more beneficial?) than the effects of regulatory capture, to the degree that they overwhelm any good lost from removing regulations. Does that roughly capture it? If so, is there evidence to support point four somewhere?