Google and Facebook competing for an Obama cabinet slot
Big corporations get bigger while smaller businesses disappear. Most regulation is impossible to comply with, and is intended to be impossible to comply with. You “comply†with it by getting favors from the state exempting you from compliance.
I work on Obamacare (well, did, I just gave two weeks today). The people at the top accept bribes to help certain companies skirt Obamacare and give everyone else a hard time in the hopes they will get on board. Bribes mostly take the form of cushy jobs post civil service and special favors.
In Japan the most egregious form of corruption is what they call “Amakudari”, i.e. descending from heaven.
Which is civil servants landing cushy post civil service jobs at private companies they used to regulate. Or going to think tanks, foundations, NPOs, etc.
It’s a huge topic there, everybody talks about it, it’s on TV, on the newspapers, elections platforms are made promising to fight it, etc.
It’s treated as a distinctly japanese problem, but of course it makes no sense. It’s universal. They’re just the only ones to address it.
The idea that you can have regulation without corruption is absurd and has never worked. If you have regulation, you can have very damaging corruption, that corruption that enables businessmen to lose lots of money and yet still stay in charge of other people’s money, or relatively harmless corruption, that corruption where regulators get paid off to do nothing. Honest regulation is not in human nature. The incentives are inherently misaligned.
Worrying about how to make regulation work is like “socialism with a human face”. The only issue that it is sane to consider is how much damage regulatory corruption will do. Regulations are never implemented in ways that give effect to the intended objective of the regulation.
The corruption perceptions index is inaccurate: It measures two things: The main thing it measures is how progressive a country is, basically how much the New York Times likes the politics of its government. The second thing it measures is how affordable the bribes are.
I hope that Sheryl Sandberg gets the position over Eric Schmidt, so that the internet will contain more pictures of her in fitted skirts and high heeled boots.
Jim you might find this intresting:
http://takimag.com/article/this_country_is_going_to_jail_gavin_mcinnes/print#axzz2CRruWimJ
It’s kind of a run up of the people already snared by our blossoming police/regulatory state.