> But an inherent bug of government regulation is that it's always vulnerable to lobbying like you cited. So it's still a failure of regulation, except one that is permanent and unsurprising.
It's a failure of regulation that the regulated would lobby to weaken regulation?
I think these positions are essentially the same, at least in the case of most consumer-facing regulation. The latter would cause a myriad of captive "independent regulatory" bodies to emerge to confuse consumers, complete with slick websites and easy to confuse names and logos (or outright fraudulent ones). It would be hard to sort through them, and no one will have the time to do it.
Meanwhile, evidently "nobody has the time" for knocking on enough congressmen's doors to override Big Business' billion-dollar lobbying efforts, and so here we are watching planes fall from the sky.
Mainly because it relies on government regulation to function, namely trademark law. It's also probably a fairly unique case, since I doubt there's a ton of money in kosher food production (meaning the payoff for abusing the system is low), and the people who care about keeping kosher care about it a lot and can focus on it due to the presence of other regulation.
If a suspect nicely asks a police officer not to arrest them, and the officer complies, that's a failure of policing.
The only difference here is that the vulnerability of regulatory bodies to asking nicely is so well-recognized that it has a fancy name ("Regulatory Capture"), and is backed by loads of published research, and quite frankly is probably the reason that the business class even submits to this sort of regulation at all.
A more accurate analogy would be the police chief ordering the officer not to arrest the judge's son for drunk driving.
If the police chief was asked on a golf course not to arrest someone, but instead do "self policing", and he complied, it's still a failure in policing, and not any failure of whatever "self policing" is supposed to be.
Maybe we need a regulation solution that doesn't involve handing over ultimate authority half the time to a party that is consistently on record as opposing regulation?