response to corporate lobbying confusion

"...saying that a lot of government regulation is actually cozy to corporations and is suppressive of new and innovative businesses"


Most of it is. A considerable amount of legislation is written by the lobbying groups. Basic opposition to de-regulation often comes from large corporations who have significant competitive advantages (relative to other companies/small business start-ups). These relative advantages are valued to the cost of consumers and market competition (and possibly to the cost of the corporations themselves at times). The basic idea that regulation is intended to punish corporations is horribly flawed. It can in the short term or will be used to punish specific corporate entities (usually at the behest of a competitor). Think of it this way, a vast percentage of funding of political campaigns comes from lobbyists. A large percentage of lobbying funding comes from corporations seeking to protect large market shares or extract additional markets. Why exactly would politicians seeking re-election endanger their campaign funding to impose punitive regulations. Instead they adopt regulations with marginal or temporary punishments to appease voters while usually exacting some marginal advantage for their specific campaign donors. As examples: Sugar is priced here at three times the world market value because American taxpayers subsidize the purchase of sugar by American producers (and have a tariff on imported sugar). Toyota is specifically written out of the hybrid purchase tax rebate. GM and Ford wanted it that way (because they aren't as competitive with fuel efficient cars). The new regulations on fuel economy supposedly mandate US auto fleet economies by some future date. The regulations are not mandated to increase over time as we approach that date and can even be extended further out into the future at the request of the major auto makers, which they quite obviously will if there's no timetable to incentivize their efforts (reading the fine print on laws rather than listening to the talking heads/politicians helps here). I'm not sure what punitive measures were suggested if they somehow fail to request that additional time that they don't really need, but the point is that our government is often complicit in the failure of a market economy and hasn't been able to make corrective actions to its policies in recent times. In some cases we'd be better off if it got out of the way. In others, we'd benefit from some injections of infrastructural/research funding to boost some obviously useful industries..and then getting out of the way once the barriers are reduced by government.