Well, compliance itself is costly, but the cost is stuff that society decided it wanted to spend money on.

But uncertainty in compliance and time spent navigating compliance is nearly pure waste.

To continue a conversation from another thread on another post, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and out-of-band context required are all costs that just happen to act as moats for entrenched incumbents. And no surprise, such incumbents often have so much influence over politics that they literally write the laws that regulate them.

The folksy aphorism goes, The more wild cards and crazy rules, the greater the expert's advantage.

	▲	marcosdumay an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm not sure. Complexity is clearly hired by lobbyists all the time, but uncertainty and ambiguity seem to me to be mostly caused by incompetence. It's not even clear if uncertainty benefits incumbents more; it can just as likely destroy a market or benefit new entrants, and you can't predict which will happen at the time you create it (otherwise it's not uncertain). Legislative houses need technocratic QA. And that QA needs to be independent from the law-writing process.
	▲	mlyle 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes-- I think most of us are familiar with regulatory capture. But the solution to regulatory capture isn't "no regulation."