Comment by vouwfietsman

> That was the contrary to the thing you were originally incredulous about

Indeed, and not everything or everybody in the world consists of completely contrarian opposite opinions :-)

> Why would members of the government have a structural incentive to pass laws at the behest of special interests? Because they get money for it.

Not in a functioning democratic government, i.e most of them.

> If it's worth more to the public than it costs then the public should pay for it.

I think you should write a 10 page book that solves all the worlds problem by just taking surface-level obvious directions on big nuanced topics, I'm sure it will be transformational.

> and they're supposed to be in trouble.

Again simplified, the bank doesn't do this. It does things similar to it, how similar is too similar? That's what regulation tells you.

> because there are only three options

Again, no there aren't. I understand that you feel this way, but things can differ on a case by case basis without being hypocritical. The world is complex, unique circumstances require unique responses. Overly unique responses create bureaucracy and overhead and edge cases. Neither is ideal. Walk the line, balance it out, that's governments' job. Do they always succeed? No. Can the problem be solved by a two paragraph simplified solution on an online board? Also no.

Needlessly polarizing every topic into dogmatic rules is exactly the thing you are accusing governments of, and are yourself now doing. Reality is harder than mathematical or rhetorical logic, because of ethics, because of complex interacting systems, because people don't act rationally, because people don't act in their own interest etc etc etc.

There are plenty of governments that use tools to overstep their bounds, yours included, those same governments are also using tools to protect people from harm. Both tools are the same tools.