I disagree. Finance is a good example. The core regulated parts of finance like retail and commercial banking are pretty good. Costs are low, they’ve gotten more efficient, services are uniform and poor performers get purged.
The issues with finance are on the edges and areas where there are really a small number of industry players. They have an outsized impact and the worst practices are usually skirting the regulatory framework.
The Airbnb argument isn’t regulatory capture example - the issue there is that it’s impossible to build anything. You have to build a giant hotel to justify the overhead of building anything hotel. Airbnb fills a gap of creative reuse and provides a tax shelter for rich people.
You turn personal housing costs into business deductions. The property throws off paper losses through accelerated depreciation while generating cash flow and then you get to reclassify lifestyle spending as investment activity.
So in other words, someone can rent out a property for a small portion of time on airbnb, while living it in the rest of the time, and yet count everything spent on it as a deductible business expense?
You can’t live in it. Average stay is has to be <7 days.
It makes sense to do if you’re in the 35% bracket. You buy a condo or a house. So you buy a house, airbnb it for one year, then rent for 2-5 more. Then you 1031 exchange it and do it again. If you don’t trade up, you have to keep the property or they recapture the bonus depreciation on a prorata basis later.
Airbnb hasn’t been about couchsurfing in a long time. It’s a mechanism to monetize real estate under more favorable tax rules.
Finance also has a ton of self-regulatory bodies, especially FINRA, which acts as a central arbiter of ugly behavior that isn't illegal. I won't sing their praises on the hills, but they do exist and they are effective at instilling a sense of fear. Taxis and hotels, and AirBNB and Uber do not have this.
Ah, great. I'm sure the DOGE youth have excellent opinions on maintaining market functionality and stability, from their vast experience of being libertarian teenagers.
The issues with finance are on the edges and areas where there are really a small number of industry players. They have an outsized impact and the worst practices are usually skirting the regulatory framework.
The Airbnb argument isn’t regulatory capture example - the issue there is that it’s impossible to build anything. You have to build a giant hotel to justify the overhead of building anything hotel. Airbnb fills a gap of creative reuse and provides a tax shelter for rich people.