https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct23/regulatory-capture10-23.html
Theoretically, democracies are supposed to limit the pillage, predation and parasitic exploitation of the public by warlords--oops I mean corporations. But democracy is in effect a wide-open auction of favors in which corporations bid for loopholes inserted in 700-page congressional bills, regulatory tweaks that favor their interests at the expense of competitors and innovators that might threaten their monopoly, etc.
The revolving door between government agencies and the corporations they regulate / fund is so well-greased that it's been normalized: ho-hum, another Pentagon official went to work as a lobbyist for a defense contractor, another bureaucrat retired and is now a lobbyist for Big Pharma.
All this grift, graft, predatory pricing, price-fixing and parasitic monopolizing costs the public and the economy dearly. Funding that could have been invested productively to serve the common good is sluiced into the private accounts of politicos, fixers, lobbyists, billionaires and other "shareholders" (i.e. the top 0.1%) where it piles up as dead capital, unavailable for any purpose other than the further maximization of private gain by any means available, which of course is led not by innovation but by regulatory capture, as innovation is risky while regulatory capture is like shooting fish in a barrel.
There is a systemic cost to the predation of regulatory capture: stagnation, decay and collapse. Bleed the productive populace dry and stifle competition to maximize private / corporate gains, and you end up hollowing out your economy and society, with easily predictable consequences: the parasites expire with the host.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opth-2020-0177/html?fbclid=IwAR36UgtJPhq1mSN3fwkF6ch9DGH9qRFjOS8zvCQi1PfYBd46Hz1Xxa1C8c0
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