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My understanding of regulatory capture is when the regulatory decision makers are beholden or acting in concert with those they purport to regulate. Most voter
by multiplegeorges 6y ago
My understanding of regulatory capture is when the regulatory decision makers are beholden or acting in concert with those they purport to regulate.
Most voters think that some level of regulation is beneficial and support it. Politicians who advocate for the complete removal of regulations don't usually do well in the polls, but this is a widely held belief in right-wing thought. The market will do all the regulating necessary. This has quite obviously been proven incorrect over the years. Nevertheless, the idea persists.
The next most effective way to have no regulations is to keep the appearance of regulations and have the enforcers be completely ineffectual, thus regulatory capture.
So, you end up with the externally perverse-looking, but internally consistent situation where the right will support regulators' existence and even promote their people into those institutions.
- tathougies 6y agoThank you for the decent explanation. You are certainly correct in your assesment. However, I was commenting on Andreesen's caricature of voters 'on the right'. While true that most voters support regulation, right-leaning voters are more likely not to support much at all, so they are entirely self consistent. When restricting yourself to only one 'side', then it's quite misleading to claim that right-leaning voters are siding with the kinds of people who enable regulatory capture. Your explanation explains why regulatory capture may arise out of an interplay between right-leaning politicians and their constituents. Regulatory capture in your view arises when right-leaning politicians succumb to voters (not necessarily right-leaning ones) desire for regulation. However, this is an emergent phenomenon, not a tenet of right-leaning thought.