The Danger of Regulatory Capture | Intellections

Regulatory capture occurs when regulatory agencies become dominated by the very industries they were charged with regulating, prompting regulators to advance the goals and interests of those industries. While regulation is necessary and can be done well, it must always be balanced against the potential for unintended consequences that harm the consumers it is intended to protect.

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[noragrets]

Wouldn’t it make sense to get money out of politics then

[CosmicDialect]

the ONLY ad I've actually ever looked up to watch AGAIN.
glad I did!

:D

[donald]

I agree up to the end where they say regulation can be done well. It really can't.

[gellister]

It is a problem of crony capitalism. If there were laws against lobbying, capitalism would be functioning better because big business couldn't so easily use elected officials to make anti competitive laws that hurt consumers. I think there needs to be regulation but the problems stem from what is being allowed by Washington rather than the system itself. Businesses will naturally do whatever they can to ensure survival and high profit margins for their investors; it is part of their fiduciary duty to do so. Government was supposed to keep these practices ethical and lawful but has instead played into their pockets. Sad facts are most of the officials we vote in are taking in indirect sources of bribery in exchange for doing what the businesses want rather than what the people want. I would love for businesses to be more "moral" and ethical but that's really not in the cards... Regulation from elected officials to make a fair playing field to encourage competition and thus innovation, that's what is supposed to be happening... Buncha garbage that it isn't.

[shelbykoch]

This is a problem with lobbying and money in politics, not regulation.

[mJC]

The problem is not regulations the problem is crony capitalism. Your solution is we can't expect the industrys to play well so we should just not have any rules.

[dustwarewolf]

There are apparently a lot of idiots in this comment section that don't seem to relyze that this video is NOT talking about getting rid of regulations all together, BUT RATHER that far too many current regulations, AS THEY ARE CURRENTLY STRUCTURED AND IMPLEMENTED, harm consumers by raising the barrier of entries for the vast majority of potential innovators to be capable of rising up to the point where they would be able to effectively compete against the major companies of the relevant industries, causing these multinational corporations to be able to make more money at the expense of the average consumer at a mere whim if they so choose, which they often do. This exact video all but DIRECTLY STATED all of this, and yet the aforementioned percentage of this comment section's commenters who are angrily ranting seem to be lacking in the intellect neccercary to understand the simplicity by which the creator of the video already explained as much. Now, to go into a little bit more detail than a two-minute long video could, the reasons for a lack of competition being bad for the average consumer/customer the vast majority of the time are rather multi-faceted by nature, but on the fundamental level can basically be metaphorically boiled down to the fact that, whenever there are multiple sellers of the same product or service, they have to try to convince as many customers as they can to buy their instance of the product or service in question instead of their competitors'. While there are technically multiple variables by which a customer decides what instance of a product or service to buy, such as nostalgia, variety in consumption, familiarity, moral appeal, sex appeal, and a few other things, by far the two most important variables in what instance a customer decides to buy are the price of the product or service and the quality of it, the latter of which can be sub-divided into a product's or service's various functional qualities in the cases where the product or service in question has multiple functions that customers might care about to varying degrees, and the overall quality as a whole. This means that, whenever there are multiple sellers of the same product or service, said sellers are more or less forced to both lower the prices of and raise the quality of what it is that they sell to people so that said people will be their customers instead of their competitor's customers, said competitors of whom subsequently have to do the same in order to remain financially afloat themselves. Of coarse the higher the quality, the higher the price, which also in its own way serves to increase both economic competition, employment opportunities, and consumer satisfaction as well. When however, there is insufficient competition, or when different competitors conspire together to "fix" prices, quality, and/or pay, the latter of which generally requires relatively few competitors to exist beforehand, the consumer only suffers because they no longer have any VIABLE alternatives to buying the products and/or services of these monopolies or semi-monopolies, and said monopolies in turn have little if any incentive to lower prices nor raise quality since there are almost no other competitors that are able to compete with them by any meaningful extent. THIS is why the CURRENT regulations are so very objectively terrible as often as they are, due to the fact that they are, as I already explained, written down, implemented, and enforced in a way that DRASTICALLY reduces the probabilities of start ups being able to eventually surpass any of the industry big wigs, and the few that do manage to become successful despite this are, with scary increasing frequency, being "encouraged" to sell their successful companies to the pre-existing multinational corporations, the latter of which tend to try, and far too often succeed in, using their monopolistic powers in order to more or less destroy these rapidly rising start ups if they can, even including the utterly insidious practice of encouraging, by which I mean paying for their election campaigns preemptively, politicians to create new regulations that are worded in a way that specifically, without actually saying so of coarse, makes it more cumbersome for the newer companies to continue their corporate growth. This in turn really just serves to allow for the continued profit growth of the predatory borderline monopolies at the cost of the directly resulting and deliberately intended lack of competition causing the bargaining power of workers to demand better pay, as well as the buying power of customers to demand products that are a fair mixture of good quality and reasonably priced goods and services, to both be rapidly diminished, solely so that the corporate elite and the politicians that they paid the election campaigns of can continue to become ever wealthier, with little if any truthful concern for their fellow human beings. This is the longest comment that I have typed down in quite some time, but all of it needed to be stated as the facts that they are.

[EMXQUIN]

Read Ida Tarbell's HIstory of Standard OIl, and you will understand how corporations behave.

[davetyler]

Maybe they should just make sure companies don't get too big. One thing capitalism needs to thrive is competion. if companies get too big they control more means less conpetion. We also have to worry about companies coming together and fixing prices

[jeffroberts]

Or maybe create laws that prevent regulators and companies from lobbying and legalized bribery?

[grasshopper]

The only good regulation is regulation against force, fraud, and violation of contract

[MrKajithecat]

You need to regulate companies and industry or we get the 2008 crisis again. Deregulation leaves an open field for illegal and unsavory practices to happen that hurt the economy and the consumer. I wish Conservatives will understand this.

[thevoiceofthelost]

Or maybe we can just seize the companies, and run them ourselves for the benefit of society rather than for the profit of our bosses. Have you ever thought of that?