Regulatory capture is indeed a major underlying cause of a lot of the issues, but who will actually do the political work to fight against it? Someone spent money to capture the regulations in the first place, through lobbying and campaign donations. Who will spend the money to lobby and donate for the cause of undoing that?
The "builders"? No, their focus and limited capital is spent on whatever it is they are working on.
The most logical choice would be the investor class who supports such work. After all, these regulations create legal risk (from lawsuits/fines/regulators) for the ventures they fund. It also makes employees more expensive (through higher housing/education/medical costs), thus requiring more investment just to get a venture going. Yet, why is there no real, funded, concerted effort against regulatory capture? Just essays and talk?
I suspect two potential reasons:
(1) Opening regulations would help all current and future ventures, not just an investor's own portfolio, so no single investor has an incentive to do it by them self.
(2) Such investors are typically wealthy, and spending money to tear down regulatory capture that other wealthy people already paid for would be... uncomfortable. Such spending could be seen as indirectly attacking friends, relatives, college classmates, etc... No one wants to be labeled a class traitor.
In San Francisco, at least, YIMBY is the organization that is organized around ending regulatory capture in housing, and The Neoliberal Project (in SF YIMBY Neoliberal) is organized around broader dismantling of regulatory capture.
We mobilize people in support of reform-focused politicians and have even started running our own (Sonja Trauss in 2018 and myself in 2020).
Happy to talk more about it -- steven.buss@gmail.com
Happy to talk more about it
I find it interesting how affordable housing must be very near high economic opportunity.
Seems to me it's a fight for convenience too.
They built Las Vegas in the desert to avoid restrictions, what's preventing this generation to build new cities?
The whole Covid problem will make quests to increase population density more difficult. But perhaps will also spread opportunities around, or move them online, so this zoning struggle will stop being important.
I fight for both market rate and subsidized housing in high-opportunity cities because it's the easiest way to life people out of poverty.
Being able to live near high-income jobs is the most direct path to the middle class in America. If we want people to not live in poverty, then it makes sense to subsidize their access to opportunity. That means subsidizing education and housing.
I've had fun nights talking with friends about starting a city. It's really fun to think about how we'd design the city to maximize opportunity, but there's no getting away from the value an existing city provides. Fixing a city with already high opportunity is just fundamentally cheaper than starting a city from scratch. All we need to do is win a few elections -- we're talking less than $100MM. A new city that is aiming to compete is a $100B+ project.
As engineers we often think the best way to fix something is to build a new version. But this is rarely true in institutions. Think of governments as legacy systems: they've been built up over time and have a ton of hacks keeping it running. Think of Spolsky's generally good advice: "Don't rewrite code" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
It is easier to fix an old and broken system than to replace it wholesale. Let's focus on fixing government instead of replacing it.
Education already is subsidised through state and private scholarships. And I believe rent is also capped in many places.
Seems a tautology that access to high-opportunity would help an individual. But if rent is too high as to be unaffordable, then the place is not so high-opportunity. Cost of living can't be excluded from the opportunity calculation.
I get that some sort of 'jump-start' in life might be required but can't help but feel that deep down this will hide a dysfunctionality somewhere.
Maybe something like Lambda Housing would prove this economical theory. Signing an ISA for subsidised housing if this proves to significantly raise the person's income seems a no brainer.
I've read about YIMBY groups before, particularly the one called BARF (if I remember correctly). This is a great start to the type of work that needs to be done.
However, I have to ask: What is your group's funding situation? Who is bankrolling the effort? Is it grassroots funded, or are there wealthy benefactors who agree with the objectives (or, from a more cynical perspective, might be using your group for something)?
For the record, I believe both approaches can work. We have obviously seen the wealthy fund politics in favor of their interests and successfully get their way, but there have been grassroots successes as well. In particular, I am thinking of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with its cause, the NRA has 5+ million dues-paying members and it has been extremely successful at deploying those funds to achieve its very specific political objectives.
On a more abstract note: the founders of America may have originally envisioned a system where various interest groups debate the issues and arrive at a governing consensus, but the system has [d]evolved into one where those groups compete to raise funds that can channeled to lawmakers to encourage them to implement preferred policies. Some groups recognized this long ago.
I’m what would be considered a major donor to the YIMBY effort and I’ve donated in the low 5 figures.
It’s generally grass roots though I know some wealthy individuals have donated much more of the total funds.
The progressive camp of SF politics often tries to discredit the YIMBY movement by claiming AstroTurf. But it’s simply not true.
This was started by motivated individuals who started organizing and then went and started looking for donations.
The reality of SF housing politics is all the “local control” has given a lot of power to local groups that can hold a new development hostage. So developers have to essentially pay them off with “community benefit” to keep each group from delaying your project through years of appeals.
This sets up a system where a small number of developers have the relationships and know how to work the system to get their projects done. Limits local construction competition.
We also have local politicians (Aaron Peskin) who own significant amounts of rental properties, and find ways of opposing new housing supply. A policy they directly and personally benefit from.
Thank you for your donations! All of my work is in a volunteer capacity, so your donations help pay for our office space, pay for the few full-time staff we employee, and fund outreach, education, and direct advocacy to move municipalities in our direction.
Your summary is correct. Most of our donations are small dollar from individuals. A few people donate more, and that's because they agree with what we're doing and they have the means to contribute. We're grateful for all support, and donations never influence any of our decisions about what to advocate for.
This is a great comment, and hopefully I could add some real life example around this, esp with 1) and 2).
Uber did this in Europe.
Uber pushed, fought and introduced gig-economy employment laws in every country it has operated in EU, specifically around taxi and for hire transport regulation. Uber employed a huge amount of legal and PR counsel to achieve this, with massive lobbying funding.
And what has happened? It's getting beaten to it's knees by new, mean competitors. Competitors that enjoyed all the same benefits without the millions invested.
Isn't Uber kind of the opposite kind of building the OP refers to?
Uber externalizes so many costs to its drivers. It relies on someone else's healthcare system to care for its drivers. Someone else to pay to maintain the cars.
So far the gig economy is maybe, half building something which has potential social benefit,half building something which clearly does not.
Now, if Uber was lobbying hard for universal healthcare, then that'd be a different story :). But IIRC they mainly avoid or flout the law altogether.
In summary I don't think Uber is a good example of a company that has tried to 'build' in a prosocial way.
The only thing uber has built really, is a way to extract more money from workers with less overhead while circumventing existing worker protection by acting as if they were just the messenger between customers and drivers.
I have the feeling that the real building of the past two decades lies in ever cleverer bussines schemes focused on lock ins, extracting user data, doing as if you are open while there is no practical way anybody could take what you did in any significant way and improve on it. The exiting things always seem to happen outside of that space however.
They did what's the equivalent of selling $10 bills for $1. No surprise customers like it, they get decent service priced at well below the market rate. For a while, that is, because it's only a way for them to leverage VC money to kill off local competitors. Once that's done, Uber's service tends to degrade, and it eventually will even more so, once their money runs out.
>Ubër has also built a service that I, for one, strongly prefer to traditional transportation services.
This is a big reason why things are the way they are: despite all the obvious externalities Uber (and AirBnb) foists on the public, the rich support if because it benefits them.
Nobody want's a new McDonald's destroying their old status quo in their country. People don't want one-world-gov. They want disparate nations, that have charm and local uniqueness. Except that goes directly towards harmonizing international (trade) laws. If you want a lesson, check out how Lidl did in Norway when they challenged local chain stores.
The failure of Lidl in Norway due to vested interests is an argument for one world government.
Maybe if we had one government we’d finally be able to settle on one electrical plug, which side of the road to drive on etc. etc. Imagine if every country developed its own indigenous WiFi standard? How lovely, until you want to read your email.
Charm and uniqueness is great on a postcard, but not when you want to actually achieve anything IRL.
Indigenous solutions typically develop differently for a reason. Building standards in a wet humid climate prone to flooding differ from those in the desert because they have different needs: if you make a standard set of guidelines that applies universally, it will inherently need to be more complicated than the guidelines adapted for a specific scenario.
Part of the brilliance of the internet is the way things are layered; you can have all kinds of different solutions for different layers while keeping things interoperable. If Australia has a different wifi standard than America, it doesn’t mean they can’t connect.
While I understand the impulse to have some central body moderate unproductive standards wars, if you enforce overly strict standards by law you stagnate industries whether you’re trying to capture them.
Just imagine how much time and effort would be wasted trying to get every software engineer to use the same programming language. Arguably it would lead to way less duplicated effort, but you’re never going to get everyone to agree on all aspects of the language. And that’s as it should be; people should have the freedom to chose what works best for them.
If we’re smart and focus more on building base, opt in, very generic/low level infrastructure that can federate responsibility and adapt to differing higher level standards rather than getting everyone on the same set of high level standards, I think we’re better off.
I’m not sure exactly what the regulatory equivalent of a tcp/ip layer would be, but some sort of very basic, fill in the blanks kind of regulatory template would be better than enforcing various discrete world standards.
I think the analogy is a little short-sighted. Having a universal building code doesn't mean every building has to meet the same standard in every way. They can contain conditional logic. Flood-resistance would only be required if the building is in an area with a likelihood of flooding above some threshold.
My point is that you get increased complexity when trying to handle all of the various different situations local solutions were specifically adapted for. Adding the type of logic you describe in that particular example might seem manageable, but there’s a real risk of it ballooning and making what used to be simple rules for a given area require a lot more paperwork/checks/etc, much of which would be irrelevant.
Like with all things, you need balance; some standards can work universally while remaining simple. Others can’t. But in general I think trying to impose universal, robust standards leads to a lot of the over regulation the article and other commenters fault for the lack of building in the west.
Fewer, minimal standards decided by people on a local level seems generally better, imo. There will still be incentives to use universal, simple standards where appropriate, as that typically enables access to a wider range of products and services, and the complex logic of deciding when certain standards should apply vs when they shouldn’t can be distributed/allowed to be flexible and adaptive.
I think the regulatory equivalent of TCP/IP is probably some form federalism. There are many regional examples of this, to varying degrees. You want the minimum set of laws to provide the conditions for local human flourishing everywhere.
“If Australia has a different wifi standard than America, it doesn’t mean they can’t connect.” This would be great IRL! All digital protocols could be reduced to one; but then IRL is also made of physics, so I guess you’d need one physical standard too (USB-C is our obvious candidate), and one harmonised set of radio frequencies etc. It’s those physical properties that are hard to reduce to a virtualised layer.
Kind of impossible when it comes to driving on the wrong side of the road, unless you abstracted the interface in some kind of VR (so everyone is apparently driving however they please, while confirming to one physical standard).
Having worked in a lot of banks, I can appreciate the desire for standardization. But remove competing standards, and you will never innovate again. In any situation, whatever standard you prefer, it was originally created as a new-comer competing standard.
I think this perspective is very narrow minded, in the sense that it only really considers a very narrow category of problem. If you want regulations to be more effective, you need to bring the regulators closer to the people they’re regulating, not further away from them. If that means people end up doing things differently, fine. It’s better than having regulations the either work for nobody, or only a portion of all people. For an analogy, who would you rather be managed by, a manager with 4 direct reports, or a manager with 50 direct reports? (Or a manager with 7,500,000,000 direct reports...)
> I think the regulatory equivalent of TCP/IP is probably some form federalism. There are many regional examples of this, to varying degrees. You want the minimum set of laws to provide the conditions for local human flourishing everywhere.
This has been tried and it doesn't work. What ends up happening is that more and more people decide that their pet issue is more important than regional autonomy.
> Maybe if we had one government we’d finally be able to settle on one electrical plug, which side of the road to drive on etc.
That's nice, but seeing how the wast majorities of crimes against humanity are made by too powerful nation states against their inhabitants I am not very exited to see what atrocities an even more powerful would do.
At least now if the local government are trying to kill you there's a small chance that you might manage to escape to a safer place.
one world standard is not the same as one world government.
one world full bureaucrats regulate-everything-to-death government is a dystopian nightmare.
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread" --Thomas Jefferson
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
> "Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread" --Thomas Jefferson
This wound up being completely false by the early 1900s. Turns out people like to eat and get paid consistently more than they like imagined freedoms.
> "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." --Ronald Reagan
Also pretty ironic coming from someone who raised taxes 11 times after fomenting a giant populist tax cut that the country couldn't afford.
That's great if you are Napoleon and have the power to just force the matter. EU comes to mind... But I don't want your rules. I want my rules. There's plenty of world to take from in order to do just that, without trying to impose yourself on the rights of others. In the end, Lidl didn't respect Norwegian conditions. Moreover, they didn't respect Norwegian customers and so most were quite happy looking the other way once things started to go badly for them. In the end, that's on them. Because they wanted to impose their rules, instead of respecting ours. Outside of that, I think we can come to an agreement on petty things like which side of the road to drive on (the Right side, of course ;) ), and what kind of electrical plug to use (I've noticed that the British one could seem a little safer). Perhaps we could come to a compromise?
1. First of all, they're not voted on by "member countries," but by representatives, who's only of secondary importance to peoples who already have to vote in local and government representatives in their respective countries. Second the EU processes are opaque to most EU citizens, and as such decisions made in the commission (where representatives aren't elected but hand picked, btw) and parliament are usually done under their nose, without their knowledge or input. That isn't democratic. That's bureaucratic, and many will agree it's even bad. The veto power complicates things further, only leading to more bureaucratic stand-still and indecision. The same goes for the so-called laws and regulations the EU passes, which are often so monolithic that they are more confusing than helpful. A great example is how trade in many instances simply broke down in Europe during the Corona crisis, due to different interpretations on common laws agreed upon in the EU parliament.
2. They are still relevant in countries who predominantly have older wooden buildings, just as one example.
I sympathise, but you don’t need one world government, just agreement and consensus between governments. That’s hard work though, it requires sacrifice and compromise, and recent history (Trump protectionism, Brexit) is against compromise or sacrifice.
Yeah, I guess what I envisage would be a very minimal federal government, rather than a central point of failure for decisions about every aspect of people’s lives. Very hard to get agreement at that scale though, as you say.
I look to Belgium as an example of the ideal world government. Trying to explain Belgium's government would require a wall covered in newspaper clippings and string, but the short form is that there are 6 independent governments with the same power as the federal government, with very long-standing cultural and linguistic strife between them. As a result, it is very hard to do much of anything on the federal level and instead, most decisions are made locally. As a result, despite Gent, Antwerp, and Brussels being about as far apart from each other as San Francisco and Palo Alto, each has a very different culture and regulatory environment regarding daily life. In Gent, it is completely normal to close one of the major roads into city center for a neighborhood festival. In Brussels, it requires weeks of fighting bureaucracy to legally block a side street for a few hours at 6AM with a moving van.
Even larger issues are handled locally. Until last year, even immigration and work permit issues were handled provincially. It would take 3-6 months to get my work permit renewed in Brussels, but after I moved to Gent, it took 2 weeks.
This all works because it is very hard to get national agreement on anything. Everybody knows that they're not going to be able to push their views on the country, so they work to change their local environment instead.
This is all despite the government being (IIRC) the largest employer in Belgium:
More importantly, Lidl didn't have Norwegian newspapers when they arrived and while some of the things they sold were great a number of others just didn't feel right. A lot of the food they try to sell just didn't work because we aren't used to it at all.
They'd have to completely undermine the world government to turn it into a dictatorship, and get the countries underneath it to go along. Is that much easier than getting power over the entire world the old-fashioned way?
I mean, sure, if you want a toothless world government with no power that wouldn't be able to keep countries in line. In which case I'm happy to report we already have this: its called the UN.
For anything else you would call an actual government, the highest body has the power and physical force to keep those under them inline. Even in the USA, where states rights are a thing, the federal government could easily force them to do basically whatever they want.
Huge countries like India, the US, and Russia have come under the thrall of men whose position in the feature space is near words like “deranged” and “terrifying”... there’s no reason to believe that the same thing could not happen to a world government
Fully fledged totalitarianism isn't overthrown by revolution, a worldwide totalitarianism isn't some kind of necessary stage before universal peace -- it would rather make peaceful, dignified relations of people to themselves and another completely impossible, and maybe for good.
> At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worth while to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything? In the United States and America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from now -- recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censorship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that government of the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts.
It's not that we now have less risk for the things that were described by thinkers in the 20th century, it's that we became more complacent and cowardly, less ambitious and more comfortable, and are rationalizing it. We don't know more, we just are less able. We don't rise to the occasion, we pull it down into the gutter with us. This is the whimper our betters have seen coming.
To believe in a one-world government, I think it’s almost a prerequisite that you don’t care about what people actually want. The only line of reasoning I’ve seen sincerely put forward for creating a central world authority to rule over all people is that some people think they know what’s best for everybody else. Not only does what actual people want not matter, but in order to achieve their utopic vision, they must protect people from themselves when they want the wrong thing.
Yup. Just look at how Communist countries view dissent. It's not "this person has a different opinion", it's "this person is broken and we must fix them".
I've been thinking along similar lines - in my mind it boils down to that these days we have problems that only a global government can solve. And you can see this through history - tribes, cities, states, countries, X.
One could view this as Uber making a novice mistake. Instead of just fighting to get rid of employment laws that slowed Uber's business, they should have fought to replace them with laws that entrenched its position.
For example: they could have persuaded legislatures to make gig work legal, but only in the context of "licensed and qualified" platforms. Reaching that status might require submitting forms to government agencies, drafting reports for publication, instituting certain internal policies, having certain credentialed staff on payroll, etc... All tasks that Uber, who would essentially write such a law, would be naturally able to fulfill while newer competitors might not.
This is a long asked question, and the recent book Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty spends part of the book exploring the emergence of a new political coalition that fights this: the YIMBY groups and associated groups. They are very young and inexperienced, but their existence is making huge waves.
There was an affordable housing builder interviewed on the housing podcast Gimme Shelter recently singing the praises of this movement, because it is such a big change from the past.
Milton Friedman did his thing from a university founded by John D. Rockefeller in a Department of Economics that is now named for Kenneth C. Griffin of Citadel Securities. I think it's safe to say that capital does spend on its policy interests, and quite effectively.
This is great observation and speculation on what could happen and where would it come from.
I've had multiple conversations with top-10 VC firm partners during our unsuccessful pitches where one of the sticking points is 'unfair-advantage'. 'How can you lock $user_group/$partners into this transaction/partnership?'
Peter Thiel: "Monopolies are a good thing for society... The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices."
What the world needs is perfect competition. VCs profess that they live in a capitalist system and work within its constraints, but just about all want to capture some part of it, preventing competition from coming in.
One way to limit competition? Get the government to do it for you. Regulatory Capture.
So, excuse me, if I don't buy this coming from a VC. And I won't buy it from any other VC as well. They are arguing for them to be in control of capture. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
So that they can take over the dominant market position, eventually using the exact same tactics to keep entrants out. Anything less would run afoul of shareholder primacy so unless VCs take an active role in promoting ethical behavior from their portfolio, those words are empty as this blog post. Anyone who wasn't born yesterday knows that human beings won't do something that is in direct opposition to their interests (the exceptions to this rule became nurses and doctors and social workers, not VCs) and without an honest to goodness change in laws, reasonable people know that VCs won't change their behavior. Since most portfolio companies are in competition with someone - a fact almost every investor in the industry is cognizant of - anything short of actually spending money on lobbying to change laws and promote their enforcement is an empty gesture.
And none of them try to lock customers, partners or decision makers from going away in any underhanded way, right? Just pure offer-the-best-and-they-will-stick-with-us. And if someone does it better than us and takes them away from us, shame on us!
Nah. Most often a16z, as other VC's, invest in platforms.
What do platforms often do: take an industry, served by many businesses, often small ones, and concentrate it.
Than, the platform does most of the repetitive, scalable, work, while leaving entrepreneurs with doing all risky work, and little place for hiring employees.
As for the employees, their work is commoditized, they get ton of competition which to leads to really deteriorating pay and work conditions, and labor laws are often broken right and left.
> Regulatory capture is indeed a major underlying cause of a lot of the issues
How is it even possible to isolate capitalism from regulatory capture? Capital accumulation inherently creates power and influence, so regulatory capture is surely just the perfectly logical second phase?
Now I can't speak for other government systems around the world, but here in Australia a big step forward would be as simple as having open and transparent government.
Currently we have a Federal Government that loves slapping 'secret and confidential' stickers on as many of it's documents, just to keep them secret.
Add to that they spends large amounts of time, money and effort fighting to keep these details secret by vigorously challenging freedom of information request.
Then we have the problem where all layers of government love getting into bed with big business, while keeping the details of these arrangements secret using 'commercial in confidence' contracts.
Just one example of the later is how the New South Wales Government entered into a secret deal with a private toll road company, agreeing to make major road changes (i.e. closing public roads) in an effort to force traffic through the new toll road tunnel.
None of this was made public at the time and would never have been released to the public had the toll company not gone into receivership.
This brought the matter before the courts and the court forced the government to hand over these secret documents:
To me this is a classic example of the problems with modern governments, where they are more interested in working for big business, rather than serving their constituents.
Yup, I agree. I just can't really see how it's possible to incentivize this at all. To _not_ pursue regulatory capture seem to require an altruistic mindset, which I'm not naive enough to expect from businesses.
In Sweden we luckily still default to making almost every government document, including e.g. all police investigations that reaches the courts, public for all who requests them. It requires special circumstances to make them confidential and nothing that can be done in the loose manner you're describing.
Reading the Wikipedia article, the lack of government transparency is crappy, but I don’t blame the tunnel company for asking the government what their plans were for the existing roads. You can’t build a traffic tunnel on the hope that people use it.
You’d need to figure out what’s happening with the rest of the roads, then make a call to build or not. If the plans for the other roads change, the value of your tunnel might go to zero.
> You can’t build a traffic tunnel on the hope that people use it.
What you are describing is a level of planning and in this case I seriously doubt this project was planned.
The only reason I brought up this one particular example is I still remember it very clearly.
I'd walk home from work and I was constantly amazed as to how bad the traffic would flowed. Every street was full of cars and on many occasions I'd notice I was actually walking faster than the cars on the street (i.e. I'd see the same car at multiple intersections as I along the street).
But on the day the tunnel opening all that changed and the traffic turn from walking pace to gridlock.
The road closure had created a situation where now no cars where moving.
Prior to the tunnel, the driving public had faced 40+ minute traffic delays trying to get out of the city but after the opening that delay jumped to 1.5 hours.
So obviously, who ever signed off on those road changes was never acting on the best interest of the driving public.
If they had been working on some sort of plan on improving the traffic flows they failed miserably.
This isn't just a big business problem, there is plenty of regulatory capture on behalf of other interest groups (eg doctors keep the supply of new doctors low).
There is no enduring structural answer to this problem, it is fundamental to democracy.
The only answers are to struggle for our goals in the political and cultural arenas to hope to marginally improve the situation.
While it's true that there will always be special interest groups, it's not true that the current situation is even close to "more or less the best it can get". There's too much power in far too few hands due to capital accumulation. This is not a natural law.
I was not arguing that this is the "best it can get", just that there is no structural answer to these challenges. There's no way to setup our institutions such that they cannot be influenced by interest groups, so the only thing to do is be vigilant and fight the good fight.
If you look at the whole range of regulatory capture we see, it's not just billionaires who have managed to get what they want, it's all sorts of interest groups who have succeeded in enshrining the interests of incumbents into law.
Good for you for being riled up about the concentration of capital, but addressing that is nowhere near a magic bullet for addressing regulatory capture.
You separate democratic procedure from capital. This is why the Citizens United ruling was such a disastrous decision for the US. However, capital doesn't necessarily mean election wins or regulatory influence, even now. Bernie Sanders raised immense amounts of money, more than Joe Biden did, but Sanders still was not able to win out in most states. There's more to politics than money, though money can definitely raise the volume of one's voice.
I agree there's more to politics than money, but, I think it is fair to say that, whatever legitimate reasons many Democratic Party voters may have had for not voting for Sanders, there is a general media and institutional bias against the Progressive political movement Bernie Sanders represents.
And, not surprisingly, the root of much of that bias is money, in the form of industries which stand to lose (healthcare comes to mind) if the U.S. elected a politician with a Progressive agenda.
I think separating the two is harder than it seems. A big part of government work is economic in nature, so there inevitably is overlap between the two.
Uhm, that's very easy to say, but how is that even possible? Even here in Scandinavia, where money interests isn't as blatantly involved in politics as in the US, most of the media are aligned to corporate interests and vast amount of money are spend by corporations to fund and campaign for right-wing business parties and policies.
Why would Biden need money in competition with Sanders when he got the entire establishment on his side?
When voters in South Carolina go to vote, did they listen to money, to their own hearts, or to "the establishment"? In any case, they did not listen to capital. And this is one way that politics is separated from capital.
There can never be perfect separation, all of society is connected to all of its parts in tricky ways, but part of maximizing that separation is to discover and acknowledge where capital has control of democracy and come up with ways to separate. No ideal is achievable, we can only strive to improve.
1) regulatory capture exists is because you give power to individuals to make decisions for the collective.
2) freedom of speech will always mean if I have money, I can spend it any way I want. That will never change. Therefore, it is impossible to limit money in politics.
Once you understand these 2 principles, its very simple to understand the solution. Money will always impact politics. You simply need to raise the price enough so that you won't end up in regulatory capture.
1) Dillute power. Cause representatives to govern a fixed number of people. For example, 1 house member for every 50,000 people. So the house would go from 431 to 6500. That would make it very expensive to hire lobbysts to capture.
2) Limit power. Term limits for aggregate public service so people can't peddle power of public office. This makes lobbying expensive since you can't permanently buy favor.
3) Randomize outcomes. By far the most powerful. Introduce uncertainty into election successs. Randomly switch winners for the house with state at all levels. So for example, a citizen from VA running for president could end up instead as a state senator for VT, or FL (and vice versa). Same thing for vice president, and any other public post. You want to make sure the "bet" on a candidate win is a very long tail in outcomes so that lobbyists don't really know what power they are actually buying by contributing to the candidate's campaign. Given that we had people like Bush, Obama and Trump in highest office, with varied levels of public office "experience", I think it is a given that there is no real qualification for running for X, other than being a US citizen of a certain age, and actually winning.
That's how you fix the current corporatism running amok in america.
The "builders"? No, their focus and limited capital is spent on whatever it is they are working on.
The most logical choice would be the investor class who supports such work. After all, these regulations create legal risk (from lawsuits/fines/regulators) for the ventures they fund. It also makes employees more expensive (through higher housing/education/medical costs), thus requiring more investment just to get a venture going. Yet, why is there no real, funded, concerted effort against regulatory capture? Just essays and talk?
I suspect two potential reasons:
(1) Opening regulations would help all current and future ventures, not just an investor's own portfolio, so no single investor has an incentive to do it by them self.
(2) Such investors are typically wealthy, and spending money to tear down regulatory capture that other wealthy people already paid for would be... uncomfortable. Such spending could be seen as indirectly attacking friends, relatives, college classmates, etc... No one wants to be labeled a class traitor.