Any regulatory regime that is powerful enough to determine the winners and losers of an industry, Richard Fernandez reminds us, is attractive enough to capture:
Increasing the power of government without a corresponding increase in transparency, does not, as many liberals believe, lead to the control of “rent-seeking capitalists” by the state, but on the contrary, leads to the control of the state and the industry by individuals whose key competitive advantage is the skill at corrupting public officials. We wind up working for the players. When business is globalized, then regulatory capture may be effected by foreign businessmen. Those businessmen are often indistinguishable from foreign leaders, especially in the case of the oil-rich Middle East. And the foreign leaders/businessmen end up capturing the regulatory mechanism. Then we wind up working, as some dons and British politicians wound up working, for the Brother Leader who is, as everybody now realizes, a complete homicidal maniac.
But it seemed like a good idea at the time. A combination of unaccountable, but powerful regulatory agencies in a globalized economy sets the stage for the capture of agencies by foreign despots. One of the dangers of the President’s “healthcare reform” and “Green energy” policies is that it creates precisely those conditions for the huge medical and oil industries. By centralizing control of the the healthcare industry, which is nearly 1/6 of the US economy, Obama has set up a target for regulatory capture more tempting than anything that had ever come before.
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Therefore all attempts at “financial reform”, “healthcare reform” and “Green Energy” must be scrutinized very carefully because regulatory expansion is a two-edged sword. It may lead, not to the protection of the “little guy” by the government, but to his proxy enslavement to special interests through the mechanism of the state.