our interest is conflict of interest

and business is good!

if it helps you sleep better at night to tell yourself that you have not been entirely captured by a crony corporatist system bent upon using the vast coercive apparatus of state to not only plunder you but erect and codify law and ethics to glorify doing so, well, have at it.

but don’t blame me for the world in which you wake up.

this is simply amazing. how was NONE of this disclosed?

you can see the whole filing HERE.

let’s zoom in to page 4.

and 5

and 6

note how many of these, micron, clean power, pfizer have been in direct receipt of massive programs of federal largess.

how is this not conflict of interest?

how is this not pay for play?

and so once more we return to gato’s first law™

as soon as you allow politicians to determine what is bought and sold, the first thing bought and sold will be politicians.

there is no exception to this, merely degree of egregiousness and scope of piracy as “governance.”

there is no way to make a state with the power to direct and demand commerce uncorrupt or incorruptible.

it will always be cheaper to buy politicians than to compete in the marketplace.

it will always be more predictable to engage in legal plunder than to guess at future trends.

the CEO’s are not bad people, but they must respond to systemic impetus and if some will go “darkside” and seek to use the state to coerce, then a prisoner’s dilemma is created. it’s hard to compete with cheating when the refs are in on it.

you cannot blame the actors. it’s always about incentives.

the pursuit of self-interest is fantastically beneficial when commerce is voluntary and pareto optimality is assured by the universal right to say “no” but becomes desperately dangerous when commerce is compelled or proscribed.

in a free market, corporations compete to best serve their customers because they are constrained by consumer sovereignty and a need to induce commerce by offering value for money.

in a state driven market, corporations compete to capture the politicians and regulators who then, in turn, apply coercive force, subsidy, and stricture upon a market to force unattractive transactions upon a people.

and the adverse selection process is near perfect: after all there is no need to coerce people into buying best of breed offerings.

you can never be free in such a system. the incentives are too perverse. they twist the beneficial game of competition to be of best service to the baneful one of competing to capture the greatest compulsory coercion.

they call it safety, common good, collective need, or “justice” but really it’s all just force applied to separate you from your agency and property.

leaving this sort of food lying around inevitably attracts wolves. the rest is just negotiating about which one gets to eat you and the seduction to allow it is always some issue you like as pretext to grant the power for lots of other issues you won’t.

“look, even the clothing makers support this safety standard!” is not an endorsement, it’s a pretext to put every small competitor out of business by adding $30k in testing costs to each and every SKU as though silk screening a firetruck instead of a ducky on the same cotton onesie renders it some vast new potential threat to toddlers.

and it really piles up.

the same power that forces some vaccines while stymying others and opposes disease treatment is the power that shutters powerplants and refineries, pushes expensive and unreliable generation and prevents the adoption of nuclear. it’s the power that pays huge subsidies to semiconductor manufacturers and that protects “US employment making tires” with tariffs that cost the US consumer $800,000 per job. it’s the power that uses “safety regs” to make you buy new car seats for the kids every 2 years and makes it illegal for children to sell lemonade.

it’s how you are made to hire 12 useless people to support the one who works.

all these “regulations” come right from the industry or the unions because the industry and the unions are the government and the government is the industry and the unions.

it’s one big revolving door full of 10,000 anita dunns and scott gottliebs and randi weingartens and al gores.

and you cannot stop it. there is no law, no oversight, no “better people this time” that will even slow it down so long as these incentives remain in place.

and so those incentives must be eliminated. it’s the only way.

we must run gato’s law in reverse:

if you wish to get politics and coercive practice out of commerce, you must take away the ability of politicians to dictate human interaction.

and this means zero tolerance. no more safety rules, regulations, mandates, or missions. no more subsidy, tax preferencing or penalty. no tariffs, no special treatment or defacto monopoly.

letting the government decide what is safe is just another way to let them decide what is bought and sold. letting the government decide who is allowed to practice law or medicine or braid hair is just another way to create oligopolistic guild systems.

1957 called.

they’re trying to warn you.

it’s time to pick up the phone.