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If you remove regulations, businesses will raise barriers to entry. Businesses don't like to compete. Competition is a zero-sum game that they might lose. Inste

If you remove regulations, businesses will raise barriers to entry. Businesses don't like to compete. Competition is a zero-sum game that they might lose. Instead, they prefer to form cartels and turn it into a non-zero sum game where they all win (and consumers all lose). World history clearly shows that lack of regulation inexorably leads to trusts, cartels, price fixing, price dumping, and all sorts of other anti-competitive agreements. It's trivially easy for a monopoly or cartel to raise their own barriers to entry to maintain their hegemony. In fact, there's a good argument that the governmental barriers to entry you are lamenting were in fact driven by entrenched businesses as an example of regulatory capture and not a flaw in regulation itself. If you let businesses get so big that not only are they not regulated, but they have taken over control of regulation itself, you're in a real pickle.

dnautics 7y ago
But what is the minimum size for a business to "get so big they have taken over control of regulation"? I have seen very small companies (like, think size of one) deftly manipulate state- and federal- level regulations to their advantage.
- munificent 7y ago
  > But what is the minimum size for a business to "get so big they have taken over control of regulation"? This is sort of like asking, "What is the minimum weight you can put on a seesaw before it tips?" The answer depends entirely what's on the other side. One way to look at free markets is that they provide economic stability in the same way that tensegrity [0] structures provide physical stability. They work not because any element provides stability, but because — when very carefully composed together! — the elements exert opposing forces which all balance out leading to a stable system. The "brilliant idea" of markets is taking advantages of forces that already exist — human selfishness and the desire to profit — and harness that to produce a system with some level of efficiency. The downside is that there's no real way to evaluate market participants in isolation. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity

dnautics 7y ago

But what is the minimum size for a business to "get so big they have taken over control of regulation"? I have seen very small companies (like, think size of one) deftly manipulate state- and federal- level regulations to their advantage.

munificent 7y ago
> But what is the minimum size for a business to "get so big they have taken over control of regulation"? This is sort of like asking, "What is the minimum weight you can put on a seesaw before it tips?" The answer depends entirely what's on the other side. One way to look at free markets is that they provide economic stability in the same way that tensegrity [0] structures provide physical stability. They work not because any element provides stability, but because — when very carefully composed together! — the elements exert opposing forces which all balance out leading to a stable system. The "brilliant idea" of markets is taking advantages of forces that already exist — human selfishness and the desire to profit — and harness that to produce a system with some level of efficiency. The downside is that there's no real way to evaluate market participants in isolation. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity