A libertarian explanation is that in the age of the Regulatory State, it's often more important to be the biggest lobbyist than to make the best product.
"In the Game of Crony Capitalism, you lobby or you die."
"In the Game of Crony Capitalism, you lobby or you die."
Moreover, there is a difference between a plausible theory and showing actual causation. How is lobbying helping Amazon and Wal-Mart to replace smaller retailers? Point to something concrete. Because it looks like the real explanation is the massive efficiency advantages those big firms possess.
Looking at other sectors of the economy: why are Apple and Samsung taking almost all of the profits in the smartphone industry? Are they better at lobbying the "Regulatory State" than HTC or Nokia?
I don't have time to put together a great convincing case, so I'll just say that this is very different from my view. Some high level regulations have been removed, sure, but meanwhile almost every corner of life now has regulations and regulators that have to be obeyed and asked for permission.
It would be nice to have some kind of objective measure(s) of the overall level of state regulation, rather than trade anecdotes/gut feels. Some economist has probably done that already.
I handle appeals in regulatory cases, so I have occasion to research historical regulatory treatment of different areas. It's really eye-opening to go read ICC, FCC, or FERC opinions from the 1940s and 1950s and compare them to ones from today. Agencies back then had vast powers: they could deny entry of a competitor into a market if they felt it would harm the revenues of incumbents. If you were an air carrier, you had to publish your prices, and if the agency did not like them it could impose prices on you. Those agencies are a shell of their former selves. Agencies used to have to power to structure industries top-down as they saw fit. Today, they might have thousands of pages more regulations covering various minutia, but nobody is going to build a "corporate colossus" lobbying to influence agency treatment of minutia.
If you honestly believe that about the US, you should visit Germany.
And of course the people who previously were favored see this as new and invasive interference, because they had grown so used to being the favored parties that they simply took for granted that "free market" = "system rigged in my favor".
We deal with hazardous chemicals, highly flammable gases and markedly unsafe working conditions.
Me and the rest of the people like me get an inspection once a year from the fire department to make sure minimum standards are kept (to ensure the safety of firefighters if they ever enter). tanks are tied up. flammables are kept in closed cabinets.
We pay the city around $100 a year in fees tied to volume of hazardous materials. Otherwise they leave us completely alone. We have to keep track of whether sales are retail or come with a resellers cert from the state.
When we have extra work, I bring in guys under the table. If I had real employees I would have to have additional insurance, and pay the city mandated minimum wage - which is a lot less than market value for a semi-skilled fabricator.
Its completely* anecdotal, but this boogeyman of massive regulatory burden doesn't seem to be universal. From my tiny little patch I'm free to fail or succeed without any state interference.
It's rarely/never that from the independent perspective of the advisor to the company...
Not to turn this into a political discussion, but these same small business owners share a similar political leaning and are mostly parroting the canned narrative they hear on their respective talk channels...
Consider that the tax code[1] in 1984 was 26,000 pages long. By 1995 it was 40,000 pages. And by 2013 it was 70,000 pages.
1. http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations...
Indeed, increased pages of regulations is as much evidence of decreased regulatory authority as the opposite. In the 1940s and 1950s, agencies regulated top-down pursuant to broad discretionary standards that could be summarized in a few pages. Today, agencies have to issue detailed regulations, justified by years of analysis and tens of thousands of pages of records, to change the lightbulbs.
Superficially, that appears to be a decrease in regulatory activity. But it's one that obviously favors consolidation, and probably has the support of a lot of big-company lobbyists.
So the reality is more complex, I think, than either you or BurningFrog are suggesting.
[0] http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril-2010/who-br...
Without government don't you get the the same place faster?
A democratic republic is ruled by advertisers - the ones best able to persuade the public.
In reality there is really not that much difference between government and large enterprises. Funny enough that can also be reconciled with the libertarian dream, perhaps by simply viewing bits of the government as extensions or private enterprise. So FDA is a subsidiary of Monsanto, FCC of Verizon and so on.
So what is the fastest and easiest way to make a most profit - change regulatory environment, lobby, and so on.
This works for large companies and down to individuals as well. We just saw in latest DNC leaks, there is a price you pay and you get named ambassador in some picturesque European country.
That is not how I understand libertarianism. It is not that government is bad. But that government's role is to be the rule maker and referee. The government should not be playing the game.
Rather than "regulate" a large company, the government should make sure the rules don't hinder competitors. Ultimately, it is more competitors each trying something different that drives price down and quality up.
https://mises.org/sites/default/files/15_3_3.pdf
and Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber
Conceiving of the government and private enterprise as separate entities really doesn't make sense. They both exist as a matter of energy and resource economy (in the sense of managing resources). They're adversarial and mutually beneficial, as is pretty much anything in any ecology.
My argument was that the non-regulatory/voluntary solution would be for customers to demand from manufacturers/sellers to provide nutritional data, else they'd contact/buy from another manufacturer/seller.
> But isn't the non-regulatory solution here to just not buy products
> without nutritional data if so?
So the race to the bottom and offering the lowest common denominator is what happens, not "competition ensures we get the best". Customer choice and competition between sellers are only two among many many more forces. It works in the simplistic model of how "capitalism" is supposed to work because - it's a model.
I unfortunately don't see how that changes anything I've said. My only contribution was to offer a supposedly non-regulatory solution could be, I have put no value in if it's a good or bad solution.
Given your feedback, I take it that you do not consider it to be a good solution - that is fine.
To discuss your feedback, I do agree that there can be and often are information shortages on both the buying and selling side, although we do seem to disagree on the influence individual and group choices (ie. power) can have or have, where I think they're more powerful and influential than what you might think. When it comes to group choices, there have been many successful purchasing associations and voluntary certification organizations through time.