A useful frame for thinking about late-stage developed economies is to ask: what does the state mostly produce? The honest answer, in the United States and most of Western Europe, is permits, reviews, and litigation rights — and the products that flow downstream from those: housing units delayed twelve years, transmission lines never built, nuclear reactors that cost five times what they did in 1980.
The standard response is to call this “regulatory capture” or “NIMBYism” and treat it as a pathology to be reformed away. This essay argues something stronger: the friction is the system. It is what the modern governance machine is optimised to produce, and the actors inside it are responding rationally to the incentives they face.
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