Theory: There has not been a single election in the US in last 20 yrs without every candidate, knowingly or unknowingly, violating myriad 'campaign finance laws' People are only investigated when they win, and then only if the winner isn't favored by the party
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In this sense, they function more like an insurance policy for incumbents and the wider party, ensuring they get to keep winners they want, and get rid of ones that are more trouble than they're worth.
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My basis for the theory is seeing how some financial-industry regulations play out in real life. Perfect-compliance is self-destructively cost prohibitive, so institutions design themselves around managing costs of inevitable, selective enforcement
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I think this is basically a universal reality whenever you try and regulate behavior that is widespread and disparate and only enforcible in rare occasions Investigating is so expensive & time consuming that its only done when the desired outcome is politically significant
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Replying to @Bugs_Meany
I was going to chide you for making such an obvious point, but then I remembered that this doesn't intuitively jump out to most people who didn't have their frontal lobes entirely replaced with a copy of a microeconomics textbook.
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Replying to @Rationalbot
It is an obvious point and i was almost going to preface it with saying so (character limits make that a pain tho) I think people who work in any economic field go, "duh"; but many don't realize regulations aren't universally self-enforcing, and some are designed as Catch-22s
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Replying to @Bugs_Meany @Rationalbot
i think most economists in Current Year are as bad about this as everyone else
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Replying to @eigenrobot @Rationalbot
If you mean opinion-columnist economists, yes; but then they're not being paid to clarify how the world works, they're often being paid to cheerlead (w/ occasional charts) one particular point of view.
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