How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation
12th December 2012
And, of course, government regulations are the vehicle of choice.
Mike Masnick explains what’s going on:
There’s a myth out there that businesses hate regulations. That’s only partially true, and it’s only true in limited cases. In many industries — especially highly regulated ones — the incumbents often love regulations because (a) they have enough power to control the regulations, (b) they know their way around those regulations better than anyone else, (c) those regulations quite frequently limit competition and (d) those regulations quite frequently effectively block out any form of disruptive innovation by stopping it entirely.
The whole point is that none of this would be effective were not government grasping the power to regulate every nook and cranny of what people do in their daily lives. If it didn’t pay to bribe leglators, either through the old-fashioned kind of bribes or the modern equivalent, campaign contributions, then lobbyists wouldn’t do it.