You used the word “idle.” If you don’t think that’s an insult, so be it.
No one is denying that some are unemployed by choice. In the late '90s if you opposed extending unemployment benefits because nearly anyone who wanted a job could get one, few would argue. But the argument is not at “some” are unemployed by choice, and certainly not all are anything, but that enough are that if we stopped unemployment payments they’d get off their asses and take one of the plentiful jobs supposedly out there. When there was 9% unemployment, only morons or assholes would say this.
I used healthcare as an example because a while back I asked if conservatives thought it was okay for those in need to die without healthcare. Mostly silence, only Bricker, honest if misguided, said that he was opposed to his tax money being used to save these lives.
As for you, do you agree with extending unemployment benefits for the many who cannot find work in these times of high unemployment - especially those who don’t have college degrees? Or do you see the choices as people working or people being idle?
No, you buy the shirt from a company who thinks they can afford it if their factories upgrade their safety.
Outsourcing is going to happen. We can afford, most of us, to buy stuff from companies which make an effort to enforce minimal standards on their suppliers, and companies which don’t supposedly take a manufacturer off the list and then look the other way as middlemen use the same manufacturer for a large part of their production. Not to mention not patronizing companies bribing their way through Mexico.
The point is that you don’t HAVE to make sophisticated choices, because the market will distill the information down for you and give you signals that help you make choices about things you don’t personally understand. I guarantee you that not one SCUBA diver in a thousand understands the detailed engineering that goes into the equipment he or she buys, and there are no government regulations protecting his choices, but the chance is vanishingly small that he will go out and buy some shoddy device that will kill him. And if he’s really worried about it, he doesn’t have to study engineering to make a safe choice - he just needs to buy a brand known for high quality like U.S. Divers or Dacor, and he can be fairly sure that he’s buying safe equipment.
And in any event, when it comes to drugs there are these specialists out there called doctors and pharmacists who are capable of giving good advice, or who can voluntarily choose not to sell drugs to people without them being fully informed. In the absence of government regulation, you can bet that liability insurers would be making damned sure that their clients are not harming people. And you can imagine new services cropping up to help and protect consumers just as they do in every other industry that isn’t regulated so heavily.
Bullshit. Liberals want to control the market whenever market outcomes don’t match what they think are the right outcomes. So they’ll regulate the market-dictated increase in drug prices. They’ll pass anti-gouging laws. They’ll pass laws that force businesses to hire certain kinds of people, and dictate how much employees must be paid. If liberals don’t think people are spending enough, they’ll have government ‘incentivize’ them or simply borrow or confiscate their money and spend it on their behalf. Liberals will pass rent control laws if they think the rent is too damned high. If the market isn’t buying up enough solar panels, liberals will tax people and use the money to subsidize solar panel manufacturers. Liberals currently want to ban some of the choices the market has made for guns. Liberals just passed a major law that will fine people for not buying health insurance, and fine employers who do not provide it. Liberals don’t like the fact that some people make a lot of money in the free market, so they want the government to take that money away from them and redistribute it in the interest of ‘fairness’.
Liberals don’t want to leave the market alone unless it becomes ‘unstable’ - they want to mold and shape the market so that it aligns with their particular beliefs in ‘social justice’, sustainable living, equality, safety, and gender and racial balance. They want to tell me what kind of light bulb I must use, how efficient my car must be, whether the food I eat can come from genetically-modified crops, etc. They don’t want the market to decide when someone has ‘earned enough money’ - they want to reserve that right for themselves. They want to interfere in corporations to alter the gap between the lowest and highest paid employees. They see nothing wrong with bailing out auto companies that cannot survive in the market place, then using their influence over said company to dictate which products it must make. Liberals believe that unionized workers should have special legal protection from the forces of the market.
Should I go on? There are tens of thousands of pages of regulations in the Federal Register. The current Democratic Congress and President have added thousands of new pages of regulations. Is it your contention that all this is needed just to keep markets stable?
No discussion of the financial collapse is complete without looking at the pernicious influence of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the fact that the Congress was looking the other way when the warning signs were developing because they thought they were helping their constituents. You also can’t overlook the role of Federal deposit insurance, and the sweetheart deals the banks have with the Fed.
Also, you would be one of the first to damn capitalism for the greed or corruption of one or a few individuals, but you don’t seem to do the same for Congress. Or did you think that all those ‘friends of Angelo’ loans didn’t come with a quid pro quo?
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the financial collapse, including a credible argument that the market failed and needs some regulation. But the collapse also revealed the deep incompetence and corruption inside Congress, yet your solution is to give those people even more oversight and control of an industry that is quite clearly deeply entwined with the government and has largely captured the regulatory apparatus. Has it escaped your attention that the banking sector and the heads of the large financial firms have been doing really, really well under their new Democrat overlords?
Terrible analogy. A better one is that a market is like an ecosystem, with lots of bottom-up feedback keeping it in balance, and Democrats are meddlers who want to keep ‘tweaking’ the populations and the distribution of food and other parameters to make it ‘better’ - then usually being surprised when the inevitable unintended consequences of their top-down commands make things worse.
It’s also absolutely true that most people are unable to understand the safety of complex vehicles they ride in, the sports equipment they use, etc. Most don’t have a clue how to measure the absolute quality of 90% of the products they routinely buy and use. That’s because they don’t have to. With rare exceptions, the market is very good at regulating quality and safety at a given price point.
You seem to have blind faith in government - how do you determine if a drug was passed by regulators because the regulators were paid off, or biased, or simply wrong? Or do you assume that capitalism is always corrupt, but government is infallible?
And it seems to me that if some reviewers or private certifying bodies were in bed with some drug companies, that would create a market opportunity for others who weren’t. And of course, since many of these certifying bodies are run by insurance companies who have to pay out if people are injured, I think they have a decent incentive to be honest. I’ve never heard of any allegations that the various auto certifying agencies like the IIHS are bought off by Ford or Chevy - have you? I work for a large company, and we spend millions preparing for our ISO 9001 audits - I can guarantee you that no one has entertained the notion of buying ISO off.
I’m frankly more comfortable with the disclosure and transparency of the free market than I am of the government.
This is true, but at the same time some supplements have proven to be safe and efficacious, and they might not be around at all if they had to go through a 100 billion, 12 year certification process before they hit the market. So long as the drugs are safe, I’m fine with letting consumers make the choice to take them. And yes, some will make poor choices. Hell, I’ve made many poor choices in the marketplace. On the other hand, government has made many poor choices on my behalf, and the consequences of their mistakes are a lot higher than the ten bucks I might have spent on a bottle of Echinacea.
Excluded middle. You’re assuming that the government makes excellent choices that any rational market would also make. But governments tend to operate with poor information, and they often have to get in bed with the industries they regulate because they aren’t competent to do so on their own. In addition, the incentives of a government regulator are very different than the incentives in the private market, which may lead them to excessive caution. Or at least to making choices about risks that would not be my own choices.
But mostly, the problem with government regulation in this area is that it’s to broad, too one-size-fits-all. The risk tolerance of a stage 4 cancer patient or an AIDS patient is not the same as the risk tolerance of someone with a sniffle. The risk tolerance of someone in excruciating pain or with a disability that prevents them from working or caring for their family is not the same as that of someone who has an occasional twitch in their hip.
In a market-oriented drug system, the ‘early adopters’ would be those people with a high tolerance for risk. The success or failure of their drug regimes would become data would be available to doctors and pharmacists and the general public, so that people with lower risk thresholds can make better choices.
Not only that, but in a market-oriented regulatory regime, drugs would enter the market more gradually, rather than being off the market completely until certified safe and efficacious, and then suddenly being dumped on everyone at once. That means there is more tolerance for failure in the market system because the consequences would be more localized. But if the FDA gets a certification wrong, millions of people will be affected.
I think that drug companies would like to spend $1 on research and sell their drugs for $1 million per pill. Unfortunately, the market won’t let them do that. Drug manufacturers know that they can be utterly destroyed by a single bad drug - ESPECIALLY if the government isn’t there to slap a stamp on the drug and absolve them of responsibility. Look at the response of Johnson and Johnson to the Tylenol murders if you want to see the lengths a company will go to to protect its reputation and ensure the safety of its products when the stakes are high enough.
I also think that any doctor who wants malpractice insurance will have to restrict himself to using drugs that his insurer believes are safe, or else will have to get an extensive, detailed waiver from the patient absolving him and the insurer of potential damages.
But that doesn’t happen either. I don’t see SCUBA companies constantly going out of business after killing someone and new ones taking their place. I don’t see equipment failures that almost but don’t quite kill people. I don’t see people coming down with mild cases of the bends because their dive computers were inaccurate. Overall, the industry maintains a high level of safety in all aspects. Without any government regulation.
Or let’s go back to your supplements issue. How many supplements are killing people? How many are causing long-term illnesses? There may be some, but it’s clearly not a large enough problem to be making headline news or creating major debates around regulation. My grocery store has several rows of supplements, vitamins, and various roots and extracts, and I’m guessing that most of them don’t do much. I KNOW some of them don’t, because they are advertised as ‘homeopathic’ medicines (i.e. water). But I can’t remember the last time I read about anyone dying from taking any of them.
Yes, you know why? Because no one will rent you gear or fill your tanks unless you show your diver card certifying that you’ve been trained by a sanctioned body like NAUI or PADI. Dive Operators will turn you away if you can’t produce your card, even though you’re waving hundred dollar bills under their noses. You know why? Because dive operators have organized into networks like DAN (Diver Action Network) and enforce standards between them, and violating the rules will get you black-balled.
They did this not because they’re wonderful people, but because they know that their livelihood depends on safety, and if divers start dying their markets will dry up. Hell, some of these operators aren’t even in the jurisdiction of major countries - they’re out on tiny islands or operating in international waters or in remote places where a regulator from the government has never been. It’s the MARKET that forces them to behave. You can find dive operators operating out of crappy little shacks in 3rd world countries, and they’ll still have their DAN placards in place and they’ll still follow the rules carefully.
Last I checked, the Japanese weren’t allowed to shut down American companies or arrest people. Oh wait.. You mean MARKET COMPETITION forced the quality up? Imagine that. I thought that couldn’t happen without government regulation.
I was there too. Those chips had high defect rates not because the companies were shoddy or trying to screw people over, but because making chips was HARD, and we weren’t very good at it yet. All the government regulation in the world couldn’t have changed that.
The Japanese didn’t tell American Companies anything. The market did. Japanese products were better, so the market shifted in that direction. That forced American companies to step up to the plate. That’s exactly the process I’ve been talking about - market pressure forcing people to spend money on quality when they’d rather blow it on hookers and booze or whatever. The market is a powerful regulator.
Hey, is UL a government agency? Oh, it looks like it’s isn’t. That must be one of those market-determined regulatory forces I was talking about.
And what do you mean people can’t die from a bad computer? There are computers in everything from cars to airplanes to traffic lights. Computers are everywhere. And they can fail, and when they do they sometimes kill people. I’m shocked but pleasantly surprised that we haven’t already regulated the computer industry to death. Large companies can and do hire programmers with no specific credentials and put them to work on software that could kill people if it goes wrong.
Every few years a new movement springs up demanding regulatory oversight of programmers, mandatory certifications, etc. They never seem to succeed, and thank God. It’s precisely the unregulated nature of the computer industry and the internet that has allowed it to be so innovative and improve so quickly. If Microsoft Windows and Android and IOS had to go through a government certification process before a new version was released, We’d probably still be using Windows 95, and there wouldn’t be an Android. Hard to imagine open source projects existing in a regulated industry.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have done it if the bug could have killed someone. We all ship software with bugs, but we triage them so that anything that could possibly injure, kill, or cost a customer money is never shipped.
But I won’t dispute that sometimes people do unethical things. But I also notice that Commodore isn’t around any more. Perhaps the market noticed, or other companies just did a better job with their products.
Really? Then explain ABS. That was never mandated. It was extremely expensive to develop, and at first was too expensive for anything but luxury cars. But there it is today, on almost every new vehicle. How come? There was no playing-field leveling going on there - just market demand. The same can be said for rear-view cameras, lane avoidance systems, run-flat tires, new metals and processes that have virtually eliminated rust, latch-key systems for infant seats, enhanced rollover protection, stability control, HID headlights, and the myriad other safety improvements auto makers have made without the government telling them to.
Hmm… Which government agency told them to do that? Oh wait… none of them did. Amazon is doing it to protect their brand and the integrity of their review system. Because the MARKET demands it. Right?
Now ask yourself - let’s say the internet was regulated like some other industries, and Amazon had to have its software inspected by government regulators, had to submit every change for approval, had to hire the rid diversity mix of staff, subject their web site to inspection for ADA compliance and face huge fines for infractions, etc. Just how much would that have held back Amazon’s development? Would we even HAVE an Amazon? Or perhaps they would have been restricted to selling books only, because the government bent the regulations to protect current competitors.
So… Do you think governments should be involved in regulating the content on the internet? Should every site that posts advice or self-help information be forced to have their content certified?
See, I’m not claiming that the market is perfect. Of course there’s bad information on the internet. Of course review sites can be gamed. But you know what? I trust people to make those choices, and I trust that if the problem becomes a big one, the market will correct it, as you pointed out Amazon is doing now.
And what libertarians are sensitive to, and liberals less so, is the fact that even when government tries to do good it carries costs. Not just the cost of government itself, but the cost of losing the dynamism of the market to the relative stuffiness of central planners. The cost of delays, the cost of dampening innovation, and the unseen costs of preventing the creation of products and services that the government never thought of.
For example, look at Minitel in France. Minitel wasn’t a bad idea for its time, and was even pretty good tech for its time. So the government in France implemented it and made it the solution for its citizens online needs. But once it was there, it barely changed. In the meantime, the market was innovating and iterating like crazy, and very quickly Minitel was a dinosaur. MInitel wound up setting the French people back years in internet adoption.
Imagine if something like Minitel had also been foist on the people in the rest of the world, so that the broader internet market never had a chance to get off the ground. Do you think government would have succeeded in ‘jump-starting’ the information age, or would it have simply caused high prices and stagnation?
No, the difference is that you think you can continually tweak and prod the market through regulation and central planning, and make the world a better place. You think that every time someone is screwed over the government should ‘do something’ about it.
My position is that attempts to fine-tune the market and protect people from their own choices ultimately results in stagnation and makes the problem worse, because control by bureaucrats is much inferior to a system that allows people to make their own choices, so long as there is a minimal regulatory framework and a civil society that ensures the functioning of free markets. I also think it is much harder to game a truly open and free market than it is to buy influence in government.
I believe the government has a place in regulating markets, but that said regulation should be limited to preventing true market failures, making sure markets are competitive, enforcing contract law, and punishing people who use force or fraud.
Would that you only restricted your impulses to those regulations that truly represent market failures. I was going to say ‘excesses’, but I have no idea what you mean by that, unless you simply mean that you’re willing to let markets work so long as the right people benefit from them, and in the right proportion. If so, you’re not defending the free market at all.
I wrote pages and pages, but this damn unregulated Firefox lost it.
I don’t have time to do it again, so let’s cut to the chase. I’m of course against central planning, and specifically rejected it in my cow analogy. Waiting until after a crash to do something is not acceptable - millions of the innocent are hurt, and not many of the guilty are even punished. I’d like to hear your idea of what regulation is appropriate, and what could have prevented the meltdown. We did have bank regulation which managed to keep things stable for a long time, at the cost of financial institutions not becoming a bigger and bigger part of the economy. They got their profits, and we got the shaft. I don’t know how you would regulate to prevent market failures before they happen. For the most part the banks thought they had risk management down pat. Of course they had incentive to minimize reported risks to maximize returns.
In the perfect world of homo economicus and perfect information, I’d be fine with letting people make their own mistakes. In this world, where many of those who were convinced to take out bad loans trusted those out to rip them off and were presented with documents they had no hope of understanding, I’d go with regulations. You and I are both highly educated and mathematically astute, and we don’t get ripped off. That guy with the high school education who has always dreamed of getting a home to call his own, not so much. In the old days a bad loan would hurt the bank also - but not now. Regulations need to be redesigned for the times, or we need to be sure companies don’t have incentives to create danger in the system.
I’d rather prevent fraud, where possible, than punish fraud. Madoff’s victims will never get all their money back. Wouldn’t it have been better if the SEC had listened to the warnings? Do you think a market without the SEC would have prevented Madoff?
Another example. The government can’t prevent all instances of food contamination. But they can cut down on them through inspections. And then can require traceability and record keeping so when something does happen, it can be tracked down and corrected quickly. Trying to find the source of contamination after the fact is too late. Same thing is true for reporting trades to find suspicious insider trading cases, or transfers of money. Or would you rather wait for the guy to fly to Rio before doing anything?
You’re wasting your time with Voyager, Sam. Don’t you remember the “Libertarian Fringe Party” thread and the FDA thread from a few years back?
There are many like Voyager. He actually wants less freedom, not more. He just can’t face that fact and admit it.
The more complicated, risky, life-threatening and expensive a decision is for him…the more he actually wants somebody else (like a government official) to make it for him. Using force, if necessary.
Conservatism is generally found amongst the upper class who want to conserve their position in the social order. Back in the day, they ruled through governmental titles such as duke or baron. Nowadays, subsequent to 18th c. political revolutions, the upper class, particularly in the US, rule through corporate power, so they naturally use free market terminology in politics to maintain the status quo even though their relations with government and legal status are not really free market (and the government is not really a democracy but rather a republic).
The upper class simply switched from political power to economic power and thus uses terminology to maintain their economic power without the need for feudal ranks. With the emphasis on economic power rather than feudal titles, commoners can become part of the upper class if they invent something of worth to society or such. However, they can become homeless too, which more commonly is the case, whereas serfs always had a roof over their head so to speak.
It’s not “free market” if you are getting government subsidies or in bed with politicians who legislate on your behalf. Corporations can weild political influence not just through money but through the thousands of employees and dependents who tend to vote when they feel their company or industry is threatened.
What I don’t get is why regular working class as middle class are so stridently right wing when it comes to economic policy. These are the people who get shit on by the callous ambivalence of corporate policies.
Instead of what? Relying on the wisdom and compassion of Corporate America?
It’s an insult, but not one that applies to all who don’t work. That’s where we seem to differ.
I would undertake reform of government assistance programs at a much deeper level. Until that was accomplished, extending unemployment benefits is a reasonable practice in the short term. Other reforms would be more beneficial.
Relying on myself to do what? Make sure the airplane is properly maintained before I take off? Or that a building meets standards for structural integrity before I enter it? Or how about relying on myself to take justice into my own hands when I feel I’ve been wronged?
The supporters of the “bottom up” approach sat on the right and sided with the monarchy? This sounds like an extreme stretch, as though you are suggesting that they were monarcho-populists.
It’s just silly, an attempt to shoehorn modern right wing libertarian fantasy into a completely different past political structure. The monarchists were all of course about obedience to the monarch, thus the name. They were as fervent an opponent of anything resembling bottom-up organization as you can get.
No relying on yourself to decide whether to climb into the airplane, or not, before you take off. If you want to rely on a government officials advice about it being safe or not, that is up to you.
Relying ony yourself to decide to enter the building or not.
Enforcing the rule of law when you have been wronged is a proper and just role of government. I absolutely expect you to have that right to expect that from your government, as a tax-paying citizen.
But sometimes it doesn’t happen. People are in remote areas, police officials are incompetent or corrupt, or sometimes you’re just in the wrong time and place and are unlucky. In that case, you might want to rely on a weapon or something else you can legally carry to defend yourself.
The problem with the FAA, and the building inspector examples above, is that they are monopolies enforced with the legal use of the gun. You don’t have a choice to enter an airplane that might be faster, or cheaper, or more comfortable, at your discretion…if the FAA does not approve it. It is not allowed. That choice has been denied to you. Just like the FDA denies people the right to use certain drugs that they may want to use. Or the state Hairdresser’s commission denies you the services of a barber that hasn’t been properly certified, to their satisfaction.
There are also no competing agencies allowed. Perhaps there are private laboratories or other agencies that could certify airplanes or buildings in a cheaper, more-effective and easier-to-understand way for you and other consumers. There are certainly private laboratories that can test drugs and food far, far more efficiently than the FDA.
The problem is that they cannot offer their opinion to you, because it doesn’t matter. What the government agency says is final. There is no room for negotiation. They have legal use of the gun to enforce their will on you, whether you like it or not. And if they are incompetent, or corrupt, or just plain wrong, it doesn’t matter. You have no choice in the matter.
Rely on yourself, dude.
Why on earth would you disempower yourself and place your rights to decide in the lap of a two-bit, unionized governmental official sitting in a cubicle in Washington, D.C.?
First of all, I find it interesting and not surprising that your side constantly throws out the best examples of regulations as the ones Libertarians want to get rid of, and you rarely address the bad ones. So when we talk about eliminating dairy milk zoning, banking regulations that are drafted by bankers and largely benefit bankers, quasi-government agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac whose executives make tens of millions of dollars trading on the good faith of the government, and other excesses of federal regulation, you respond by talking about how silly it would be to privatize roads or eliminate safety regulations for public buildings. It’s a good debating tactic, but it doesn’t do much to illuminate the issues or allow for decent communication between both sides.
And to be fair, many libertarians do the exact opposite - refuse to acknowledge the things the government does well, constantly focusing on the things it does worst and using it to tar all government action. Both sides should be more reasonable when debating.
Very few people want to remove safety regulations for public buildings. Even libertarians recognize that there are areas where regulation is required, and building codes are one of those - although there’s a good debate to be had over whether those building codes are gamed by developers in bed with local politicians, or that they are set up to protect union labor rather than promote safety or to protect vested interests from competition.
In fact, libertarians make the argument that if you got government out of all the things it shouldn’t be doing, it would allow them to focus better on the things it should be doing. It would do those things better, and there would be more scrutiny of what it does if it wasn’t so obscured by a million other activities. So if you really care about key things like building safety, perhaps you shouldn’t be encouraging government to get involved in trivialities like providing free birth control to 30-something professional women or regulating toys at garage sales.
But let’s address airline regulation for a minute. I remember the debates around deregulation very well. The arguments were the same as the left uses now - if you deregulated airlines there would be a ‘race to the bottom’, and dog-eat-dog market capitalism would result in corner cutting, poor safety oversight, and the result would be chaos in the air.
None of that happened. What actually happened is that fare prices plummeted, safety improved dramatically, and the entire industry became more dynamic and innovative.
When trucking and rail were deregulated, the arguments from the left were similar, except that they also added that there would be a rapid consolidation and the ‘big players’ would have a monopoly and destroy competition. Again, they predicted a decline in safety and quality. And the opposite happened. In fact, the U.S. now has the most efficient freight rail system in the world - and the least regulated. Its safety record is stellar. Before deregulatiojn, the rail freight system was marked by high rates of bankruptcy, high prices, and poor efficiency. After they were deregulated, productivity increased 172%, real rates have declined 55%, and rail’s share of the overall freight market has increased. cite.
The latest round of deregulation has been in the space industry. Starting under Bush and accelerated under Obama, the private space initiative focused on removing regulatory barriers to the creation of spaceports and the testing and flying of large rockets. The result has been an explosion in private space companies, a burst of innovation in radical new engine and vehicle designs, and a sharp decrease in cost. SpaceX is currently building the Falcon Heavy, which will be the largest rocket flown since the Saturn V. They are guaranteeing freight rates that are 1/6 of the cost per kilo of a launch on one of the traditional alternatives. Other companies are hot on their heels. And they’re not all just selling services to NASA - they’re selling private launch services to other private companies.
So Libertarians have a lot of real-world data showing that many industries are excessively regulated, and can show a history of improvement in those industries when the government gets out of the way.
Yes, people are using the magic of the marketplace to self-diagnose themselves on the internet, buy counterfeit drugs from unregulated internet pharmacies and go blind or kill themselves because they took something they shouldn’t and wouldn’t have been able to kill themselves had they only been able to get drugsd via a regulated system.
There’s a reason why every civilised country has a regulatory body for pharmaceutical products. It’s because they know what the alternative is.
It’s not like a bunch of guys woke up one morning and decided to regulate the fuck out of everything to cause massive deadweight loss to the economy. Regulations were put in place to improve public health, the environment, prevent fraud and criminality and so on. And in some cases Sam, like with pharmaceuticals, to prevent actual deadweight losses to the economy.
Your last point confuses enforcement of contract with regulation. Nobody that I know of argues that a proper role of government is not to provide redress for grievances through a well-functioning court system. Another wild strawman, of which Sam Stone noted is a common debating tactic in threads like this.
Your environmental point also touches on negative externalities or the “tragedy of the commons” problem, which is exactly what good regulation is supposed to address.
And as for your contention…well, yes. I actually do think a bunch of guys wake up every morning and decide to regulate the fuck out of everything, in order to cause massive deadweight losses to the economy. It’s called rent-seeking. It’s been happening since the Middle Ages, and probably earlier.
The deadweight losses do not personally affect them, nor do they affect the politicians who make the decision to enact the regulation. They affect the millions of consumers who now have had their choices reduced, have been disempowered, and have no say in the matter.
The classic example is the taxi medallion system in many major cities around the world. Google “New York Taxi Medallion” and read through the many articles on fights to both protect this legally enforced monopoly, as well as the $1mllion a piece that medallions recently fetched.
State Hairdresser’s commissions are another classic example.