by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-12 23:53:43+00:00
> But I'd point out that it's far more the case that management destroys a business, not a union. The US has fairly weak union protections and few unions at the moment.

It's possible that those two sentences are related.

> But also we need to start talking about what it means for a business to be productive.

So to some extent the premise needs to be challenged. If e.g. Kmart fails, but there are a zillion others to take its place for workers and customers, then its failure is primarily of impact to its shareholders and it's their fault for hiring shortsighted fools to run it. The people who used to work there can just work somewhere else.

If e.g. GE fails, and it was the primary company sustaining some industry in the US, that doesn't work because now nobody is doing that here anymore. But the problem then isn't that they failed, it's that they didn't have enough domestic competitors to begin with. Mismanaged companies are supposed to fail, what they're not supposed to do is take the domestic industry with them.

> Regulatory capture is when a business keeps out competitors through hard to fulfill regulations. It's not when the standard for employees is high making it hard for new employees to enter the market.

That's literally the same thing. "New employees" and "competitors" are synonyms.

> The acid test for regulatory capture is "is there an oligopoly here" and the answer for trade work is a clear "no".

So zoning rules can't be regulatory capture for the housing market, even if they're unambiguously limiting supply and raising costs, because there is no oligopoly?

> For very good reason. Tradework done poorly gets people killed. Taking a one time test is a very bad way to ensure that quality is high.

It works for truck drivers and lawyers and real estate brokers etc.

Meanwhile the assumption is that the apprenticeship requirement would have higher standards, but it doesn't. It's even less effective. All it is in most places is a time requirement. If your overseer has you doing nothing but wrote physical labor of a uniform type that only represents 1% of what you would see if you went out on your own, you've still put in your hours and get your license. And it's far more susceptible to corruption because then people sign off on hours not actually performed in cases of nepotism etc.

> There's a reason places without unions also use the apprenticeship method of licensing (doctors for example).

That's just another example of trade organizations capturing the regulators. The fact that they use the AMA instead of a union doesn't change the nature of it.

> For example, microchip fabrication. It's simply too expensive to buy the equipment to make a computer chip and that can't be solved by anti-trust enforcement.

Sure it can. Prohibit vertical integration. Make all the fabs contract fabs (most of the state of the art ones already are) and then separate the facilities from the production equipment. Then TSMC or Samsung or Micron don't fabricate chips, their business is essentially building new fabs for independent third parties. At which point they stop worrying about "overcapacity" because their profit only comes from building more fabs. Then someone like Apple or AMD goes and contracts with the independent fabs to produce their designs, only now each facility is a separate company in competition with the others.

Meanwhile the companies that produce the equipment would then be smaller (because less vertical integration) which lowers the capital requirements to enter into that market. And if you lower it enough then they all end up in cross-licensing agreements and the only requirement to enter is to develop ~1/Nth of the next generation's improvements where N is the number of existing companies, so that they each want to license yours as much as you do theirs.