Having worked on the inside: this is by design. You know for 100% that Pepsico and Coca Cola unleashed an army of lobbyists to make sure the laws were written in a way where the single market only worked for large business.
It's comforting to believe that large corporations with the greed of the rich and powerful is what makes these inefficiencies but really it's about a million little political negotiations, primarily driven by voters dislike of change.
It's comforting to believe that actual voters have that kind of political influence over these things, but really it's about a million little talls, primarily driven by lobbyists commanded by big companies
You are about 20 years out of date. Modern politicians get almost all of their funding from small donations, in other words, from passionate partisans who care about culture war issues.
That's because megadonors don't give to candidates directly? In order to trigger the unlimited campaign finance guaranteed by citizens united, you create a super pac. They can't openly coordinate with the candidate.
If you add in all super PACs and outside spending, it would make up roughly 30-35% of the overall expidenture. That's a lot but super PAC money is worth much less to a campaign compared to donations because it can't be used for core expenses like labor.
It’s both. Massive regulation is usually driven by good intentions, populism. Large corporations often don’t mind when it means it would prevent smaller companies from competing with them.
Because if it's just a few evil people making the world bad then that's fixable. The truth that it is it's an extraordinarily complex stew of incentives means its harder to fix.
Sure, cynically, you can use the argument that we can’t just limit the influence of megacorps because the problem is more complex than that. Sure, but limiting them will still help.
Why not do the obvious thing that can still help? There are some simple things we as a people or a conglomeration of peoples can do to curb the enthusiasm for state level corruption. It is doable. It will not solve everything - but surely we can still do it.
> lawmakers need to be corrupt and/or incompetent for lobbying to do this.
Not really
Lobbyists get to talk into the ears of the powerful. It is literally their job. They make very sensible arguments for their point of view. So it seems very sensible, for the legislators, to make laws that aid the powerful and impede the weak.
The legislators are very busy with pressures from all sides. The cognitive load of considering views that you do not hear is enormous. It is not "incompetent or corrupt" to fail.
The system has the corruption baked in. It is one of the mechanisms, of many, that wealth and power concentrate in "democracies "
I have seen this process from the inside, good people making terrible decisions
I'm sorry they're so busy, but everyone's busy. Not everyone gets to drag money out of people on threat of jail, not have to pay any corporation tax on it, and spend that money on offices and salaries, do a bad job, and have everyone solely blame other people for their failings.
It's like if a judge blamed one side's legal representative for their terrible decisions. The legal representative is not paid to be neutral. They're paid to represent their client. The judge is paid to be neutral.
That removes the culpability again from the people being lobbied, who are for paid by mandatory taxes, so they don't have to win work - their only job is expertise and honesty.
I don't think it does. Of course they are culpable, that's the whole point.
Them being in that position of power is not god given though, nor set in stone. Replacing them is a single election away. Still, people keep voting for them. So the ultimate responsibility is with the people who keep voting them into office.
Last time I checked, regulators are part of governments which tend to be confirmed in one way or another in democracies.
Different story on non-democratic forms of government. There the hate is justified. But just complaining about regulators relieves those in power (the voting populace) of their responsibilities. Tempting (and convenient) though for everybody part of that populace.
Elected representatives decide who is in charge. For example, in many countries they elect the government. To which the secretary of housing belongs which decides how housing policy is executed which is implemented by the bureaucrats in that department. It's all rooted in the democratic will, albeit some processes are slow to change (which is a feature too so that a crazy person can't trash your country too bad before you have a chance to course correct at the next election). If it were not then you would not be living in a democracy.
Though it seems we are going in circles since the way you phrased it indicates that you are unwilling to even engage with my argument. Nobody claimed that the regulator is in the political party, (except for one-party states perhaps which are notoriously undemocratic).
I think we agree then that given their eternal, apolitical nature, replacing regulators is not "an election away", even if people weren't already voting on a vast array of different issues and thus no one could determine from a vote that a particular regulator needed replacing.
Lobbying is fine, though. Lobbying isn't bribery, although sometimes it probably looks like it. Lobbying is also an industry saying "please don't kill us; here's why that thing will kill us". The people making the decisions have the power (hence lobbyists need to exist) and they need to be better.
The revolving door between politician to made man (lobbyist) seems like a bit of a problem, no? These poor ex-politicians/staffers need to earn those mil+ salaries or they couldn’t effectively save these poor industries from demise? Perhaps the politician being asked to go easy on the regulations is potentially influenced by the ex-politicians rather lucrative position?
Corruption does not need to be overt to be destructive. It’s absolutely pervasive.
I will treat this comment charitably and just say that it's yet another case of "definition of X sounds good, so X can't be bad".
I believe in reality it's less about "please don't kill us" and more about getting officials to set up the "pleas profit us" situation.
Yes, money don't change hands in an office, so it's TECHNICALLY not a bribery.
Well, unlike regulators, companies die without profit. So they do indeed need profit. Smaller companies might want a system currently tilted against them to be changed. Larger companies might spend a fortune on regulation-following that has harmful outcomes, e.g. raising prices, for no benefit. Both of those motivations sound reasonable, and both getting their way may result in more profit for them. There's nothing wrong with profit.
The only thing that can possibly be bad is the regulation-writer, or the regulation enforcer, behaving incompetently and/or corruptly, who decides or enforces bad rules.
The lawmakers are: in the EU you have a block of right-wing parties. The large part are funded by large companies and make laws which favour them. Same thing as in the US.
There are other right-wing (and left-wing) blocks who are funded by the Kremlin and Kremlin-supporters who just try to break things.
At the EC they're not corrupt, they try their best, but they're often given bad advice and are themselves not experts. And their power is limited (they can nudge but not push).
> a block of right-wing parties. The large part are funded by large companies and make laws which favour them. Same thing as in the US.
You need to be mad to think it's the right wing parties in the US who get the most funding. E.g. [0]
> The Biden—now Harris—campaign committee raised $997.2 million and Trump’s campaign committee raised $388 million in total between Jan. 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024, the most recent date for which Federal Election Commission filings are available
Might want to take a look at the news channels you're following as none of them describe the Democrats, outside a bit of performative "socially left" things (like keeping the government out of bedrooms - though as a libertarian I don't consider it a "left" issue at all, more a basic freedom).
The two main US parties are firmly right wing, although the Democrats do have a small number of centralist (like Bernie) and centre-left people (though I dunno if any are actually in the Congress).
I'm surprised that was necessary. A single look at the EU website leaves no doubt that the EU is perfectly capable to create a bureaucratic nightmare all by itself (and incapable not to even if it tried).
