Regulation as incumbent paywall

Many small, occupation‑specific barriers (licensing, registration, platform rules, trade limits) each impose tiny costs on many people while delivering concentrated gains to incumbents; scaled across sectors this yields large aggregate welfare losses even though each individual protection looks plausible. Recognizing this scaling arithmetic explains why some policy ideas ‘don’t scale’ and why political demand for protective rules is structurally persistent. — This reframes debates over licensing, platform rules, and immigration as a collective-cost problem rather than isolated sectoral fixes, shifting attention toward aggregate tradeoffs and who captures benefits.