Regulation is often a tool incumbent businesses use to keep out new entrants. Many journalists, however, understand regulation only as a tool the government uses to protect the public from business.
The conventional view of regulation causes confusion — or at best, unwarranted surprise. Witness the unnecessary “actually” in this report on regulations about selling e-cigarettes:
So the government wants to protect smoke shops from lower-cost retail alternatives — and smoke shop owners support those regs. Nothing surprising there.
E-cigarettes contain no unhealthy ingredients. They do contain addictive nicotine, but I think these products don’t need to be heavily regulated. That means the prime effect of the rules is hurting competition and hurting consumers.
(Of course, drugmakers, whose drugs compete with e-cigarettes as smoking-cessation methods, are lobbying to restrict e-cigs, too.)
