I mean if you blocked companies from acquiring their competitors sure.

Otherwise you just end up with the largest company treating acquisitions as an R&D expense.

The current UK government has not been doing much of this.

We did that in comunism with the known results.

Like they can build housing and windfarms, etc.

(The US actually has more public utilities than the UK.)

To a degree you can do it, have the state own companies. But it will kind of be economically inneficient, high position employees and some politicians will steal money. No one will have the motivation to push farther.

Most US transit systems are bad because the government puts even more effort into stopping them from working (via bad land use, incredibly slow decision making, power-harassing Andy Byford) than it does operating them.

It is only acceptable to give money to corporations.

Seems very convenient and totally unbiased

So I go and register an LTD company now I am eligible for free government money.

We tried that. It all went into real estate and stocks and gave birth to a massive scam industry involving crypto and other get rich quick schemes.

The average joe didn't see much trickle down to him unless he was already invested in real estate or stocks.

Giving away free money without any strings attached to individuals or corporations is a bad idea as they both can be extremely reckless.

Here, we're discussing a different paradigm: interest-free money vs free money. The issue is that interest-free money has little to no use for individuals. They can't put that interest-free money into an existing business and reap the returns. That's why most people just use that "interest-free" money for stocks (margin trading) and even then it wasn't fully interest-free.

The fundamental issue is how to give individuals interest-free money and have them see returns. Maybe using that money toward job training, or starting incubators that find small businesses and infuse them with money, mentorship, etc.

Tax-breaks doesn't mean giving money to businesses, they mean taking less money from businesses.

At least giving money directly to poor people is spent on things that can grow local economies. It is not perfect, but a lot more “stimulating” than giving money to institutions, corporations and rich people.

[1]: https://fortune.com/2023/03/20/is-federal-reserve-too-powerf...

What's the mechanism? A big loan is a big risk. With a big risk you can have either a big reward or a big failure. Smaller loans, smaller risks, smaller rewards and smaller failures. It's proportional. Why do you think of wealth redistribution?

Big risk are if you use that big loan to start a new business, but not if you dump it all on stocks and desirable real estate in hot or future hot areas.

Buying real estate seems sound only because real estate has some good returns last years. But real estate can go down real fast like in 2008.

Many people gambled money, be it stock, real estate, crypto. Some got very rich, some didn't, some went bankrupt, some will.

I don't believe in speculation and gambling. The market can always can catch you on the wrong foot.

I believe in hard work, well invested thoughts and patience. The results might not spectacular but I rather construct my future than gamble it.

For every new billionaire who got lucky there are 100 new beggars who had bad luck.

You tried the wrong thing. You shouldn't hand money without conditions. Instead of letting speculative assets grow, you should only let productive bussineses borrow money with low interests. Businesses which produce tangible goods and are creating jobs.

By contrast I now live abroad in a developing country and it's quite amazing how ripe small business is. Want to sell bread? Okay, bake it and sell it. You can even get it stocked at "convenience marts" easily enough since a that's often just some guy's lower floor transformed in a shop. Talk to the owner, who's probably the guy at the counter, and make a deal. If people like your bread, you're now officially a baker - congrats.

Make it easier for people to sell stuff, and there will be more stuff. And the prices of stuff will trend downwards. While money is a way around these issues, a regular joe who happens to make a great loaf of bread probably isn't especially keen on taking on 5-6 figures of debt just to see if selling his bread actually works, let alone being something he really wants to dedicate himself to.

In some cases, business simply ignore regulations that that are obscure or inefficient to comply with; this leads to corruption and/or shadow economies.

In more cases, business is simply discouraged and doesn’t grow, or just doesn’t start at all.

The messy patchwork is city, (sometimes) county and state licensing and taxation framework in the US is a huge drag on small business.

I am not arguing for no regulation, licensing, or taxation, only that these entities recognize that requiring businesses to file paper tax returns every quarter, even if they have done zero business in a given city is a significant hindrance to business activity.

This is an excellent idea. Just lower the barrier whatever that barrier is.

Some people can think that lowering the entry barrier can result in subpar products and services but in fact the higher the competition, the higher the quality will be.

If this were true, then appliance manufacturers who produce higher-quality goods would be rewarded. But instead, we're at a weird state where appliances are still not cheap while also not being built to last.

Competition isn't guaranteed to keep the market honest; I'd argue once a market passes a certain size the number of people who can spot lemons becomes insignificant, and then it's a race to the bottom.

Excessive bureaucracy and excessive legislation have the perverse effect to seemingly protect the consumer while in reality helping the big players. Small players will go out of business while new players can't enter. It wouldn't be much surprise if powerful lobbies ask for such legislation while they pretend they think of the public good.

No one likes competition, even entering the bar as a new lawyer is difficult.

Sure, you can raise the standards so much that only multi billion companies will be able to comply. In fact that is what we witness today. How many mom and pop shops still exist compared to the '60s?

Let's just be honest with ourselves that these regulations cause us to have less stuff, and consider when they are worth it, and when they are not.

And 100% - making it easier for individuals/businesses to comply with regulations is winners all around.

I don't believe "safe" and "good quality" are necessarily aligned. I live close to a dairy farm where they sell (their own) unpasturised milk. You bring your own bottle, fill it, and pay in the honesty box. The farmer has a (small) disclaimer suggesting that the milk be boiled prior to consumption, but I don't believe any of the local buyers actually do that.

Q: Should this be forbidden?

UNPROCESSED Raw Milk (animal species)

There should probably be a poster or something created by the FDA that quickly summarizes the risks involved with not performing each of the mandatory safety steps for normal retail 'Milk', and it would be helpful if more detailed information were available on a website and from the local health agencies.

Some states such as California do have special exemptions for "cottage" production of low risk foods such as bread.

https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CEH/DFDCS/Pages/FDBPrograms...

In other industries it's much easier to legally start selling things. Want to make screwdrivers and sell them to the local hardware store? Go ahead.

Bread was just an example. Just try to open a small corner shop and see how easy it is. Almost any small business has legal obstacles and a barrier as a high to entry as a large corporation. While the corporation can pass that barrier, little guys can't.

> Want to make screwdrivers and sell them to the local hardware store? Go ahead.

I doubt you can do it without having to pay attention to thousand of different regulations.

It's only when you start making all sorts of things for yourself that you really start to see how completely irrational the markup on many things is, which then begs the question - why isn't anybody simply dropping the prices by 50% and making a killing? And the only answer I can really see is because it's become really quite painful to be able to sell things in America, unless you want to go all-in on it.

I'd also add that in terms of food safety, the big concern is not small business, but big business. Buy food from an individual or a family and you're eating what they're also eating for dinner, and probably have been for decades. By contrast at e.g. McDonalds, those executives probably aren't touching their "product" except for photo ops. Their only motivation is to maximize profit, which often comes in the form of sacrifices in quality or even safety of what's sold. [1] And this has always been true. "The Jungle" wasn't about Joe Bob's streetside shop.

[1] - https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/20650-lftb-to-be-classi...

Sure if you bake a few loaves of bread at home then that probably seems cheap in terms of ingredients. Now add in your labor, allocate costs for utilities and kitchen appliances, and figure out what it would cost to drive around all day delivering that bread to retailers. Suddenly it's not so cheap.

But yeah I think that's weird and destructive. Wouldn't it be better to prominently track and celebrate how much new housing is built?

OTOH, many people have all or most of their net-worth tied up in their home price. So even though NOTHING CHANGES when that price goes up or down, it has a psychological affect on them, who vote a lot.

Small plots of land are dominated by HOAs. Finding small plots of "unregulated" (no HOA) land requires one to live very far from a city & decent grocery stores.

I'm not a big fan of the red tape of regulation & how regulations can be abused by large capital, but in the case of housing, HOAs are a bigger problem. Of course, there are also municipal regulations which require small plots of land to be more tightly regulated re: housing.

Debt is a heat sink, which is why Japan failed to spur inflation for two decades despite pulling every spending lever they could come up with. Debt kills economic dynamism, robbing the economy of the capital it requires to invest, expand.

To get to inflation out of borrowing + consumption, you need supply to not keep up. For most of the prior two decades for the US, supply kept up (courtesy of the China manufacturing juggernaut, which was a deflationary force for US consumers). The China effect has reached its end in terms of peaking, the next two decades will not see that kind of offset benefit (at least for the US).

Over the coming decades, the US will see similar problems that Japan did in terms of being unable to spark expected levels of inflation, despite high spending and debt problems. The cause will be the same, more and more of the economy will be locked up in the freezer as debt (typically yielding ever lower interest, in a downward spiral).