Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 184 of Charles Koch’s and Brian Hooks’s excellent 2020 book, Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World (footnotes deleted):

One way that companies – especially large ones – try to rig the system is by supporting complex and anticompetitive regulations. Why? Because they have large legal teams and can afford to comply, while the added costs will hurt smaller competitors and reduce start-ups.

Hence, some big businesses cheer the growth of federal red tape, which ran to 23,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1960 and nearly 190,000 pages in 2017.

DBx: Indeed, and sadly, so.

Another advantage that large firms typically have over smaller firms is a larger customer base – over which the fixed costs of complying with government diktats can be spread more thinly.