Three candidates actually. (Bernie, Warren, and Yang.) ... Loss aversion is a powerful emotion with destructive effects on our politics. Once enough people h

Three candidates actually. (Bernie, Warren, and Yang.) ... Loss aversion is a powerful emotion with destructive effects on our politics. Once enough people have something to lose from a change, change becomes extremely hard, even if the overall net effect would be positive. Not only does this preserve bad policies, it turns some into a one-way ratchet--where it's easy to make things worse and very hard to make them better. Examples - Medical middlemen (insurance, insurance brokers, billing companies...) are pure waste. But they employ so many people and generate so much revenue that they are very hard to attack. The US has slowly climbed to ~2x the per-person medical spending of our peers... so now, any effort to reduce that to 1.9x will be met with fierce resistance. - Prison guard unions are powerful nationally and in many states, including California. They fight any and all attempts to reduce incarceration. That was true in 1980 with ~100 prisoners per 100k population... and it's true now with ~650, by far the highest in the world. - Realtors and car dealers essentially tax the two biggest purchases most people in America make, house and car. They have powerful lobbies in all 50 states. There is no particular amount that will placate these rent-seekers. They just never want their income stream reduced.