Living off the grain in the silo can’t be the best way forward. To some people who get in the silo, it must seem like they won’t have to eat again. Many others are following the incentives created:
‘Indeed, if there is a single fact that sums up the state of American political economy at the present moment, it is this: the Boston office building once home to Inc. Magazine and Fast Company, which chronicled and celebrated small and fast-growing businesses, is now the headquarters of a publication called “Compliance Week.”’
Related On This Site: Mead takes a look at the blue model (the old progressive model) from the ground up in NYC to argue that it’s simply not working. Check out his series at The American Interest.
Once broader ideas of the public good take hold, they tend to lead to greater claims of the public square, and view market activity as an animal to be harnessed: Amartya Sen In The New York Review Of Books: Capitalism Beyond The Crisis
This is a great subject for a doctoral thesis. Even small business owners like myself have to hire compliance firms to help complete the compliance paperwork as well as pay hefty license fees to support the regulators. The regulators, in turn, have been bought by the large firms in the industry to ensure that when non-elected administative officials in the regulatory agencies make new laws, they are designed to make life difficult for the small firms. All’s fair in love and business, right?
Malcolm, thanks for sharing.
Crony capitalism at its finest, no?
That’s my biggest complaint with California politics. The more entrenched Left leads to more regulations, the regulations favor a few major contractors/businesses who make barriers to entry and solidify their standing. The regulators have every incentive to keep regulating, and the lawmakers to keep the status quo going, including being controlled by those same interests driving the regulations and often self-serving laws (unions, environmentalists) to get re-elected.
Everyone else is shut out, or feels the pinch.
This model generally leads to a kind of ‘democratic’ noblesse oblige, a stagnant economy, a pretty ‘cozy’ politics and a poorer society in wealth and spirit.
I can’t say I’m liberal, when I see what this kind of liberalism leads to: less liberty for so many, and all kinds of self-interest free riding on the public good, and as always, human nature being what it is, just as much favoritism, ambition, cronyism as ever.
It just gets people, families, and opportunities wrong in so many cases.