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Welcome to 2018

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 3, 2018 15:31 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
In reply to: Welcome to 2018 by pizza
Parent article: Welcome to 2018

Governments by definition are monopolies. Businesses have to satisfy customers in the face of competition or they go out of business.

The worst possible solution is government regulation of businesses, because of "regulatory capture", where the bureaucrats picked to staff the government bureaucracies must have knowledge of the industry, thus they come from the very industry they are regulating. The alternative is to pick bureaucrats who know nothing of the industry, but guess who educates them? -- those same experts who were expressly not picked as the regulating bureaucrats in the first place.

It's a common theme that businesses are greedy and government bureaucrats are noble, but it's nonsense. An economist named Buchanan won a Nobel Prize for "public choice" theory which debunked this fairy tale and showed that bureaucrats are as full of self-interest and bias as anybody else. The difference is competition, ie, lack of monopoly.

Yes, businesses do lots of stupid things. The difference is they go out of business and are susceptible to lawsuits for malpractice.


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