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Comment by Aerroon

7 months ago

The trouble is that governments might not have a bias towards any company, but the government employees doing everything do. If the government is handing out a lot of assistance then you get a layer of middlemen who will help companies "get things done". The issue with this is that they are an additional burden that suck out resources from the system.

I think on balance there's a net gain in value. Enabling new companies to navigate burdensome regulation contributes to the economy in the long run. If money is a problem big companies who made the regulation necessary with their ill behaviour can subsidise the entry of competitors. I think people are starting to call that "coopertition" as a idea somewhere between taxation and corporate social responsibility.

  • One of the major things governments should be doing and largely aren't is publishing open source software (e.g. BSD license) for regulatory compliance. Not just a tax filing website, the actual rules engine that some government lawyers have certified as producing legally-compliant filings.

    The point being to allow members of the public to submit a pull request and have their contributions incorporated into the officially-certified codebase if it's accepted, so the code ends up being actually good because the users (i.e. the public) are given the opportunity to fix what irks them.