"If we had had in 1900 the regulatory and legal environment that we have now, we would never have gotten the family car; imagine that Ford had gotten sued every time someone steered a Model T into a ditch. Alternatively, if we had kept the regulatory environment of 1950 (1930 for aircraft) throughout the rest of the century, we would have flying cars today.
"Over the long run, unchecked regulation destroys the learning curve, prevents innovation, protects and preserves inefficiency, and makes progress run backward. All the reasonable predictions of Golden Age SF and postwar techno-optimism were predicated on the continued growth and affordability of energy. They also presumed an environment of sanity in law and regulation. We had had both throughout the industrial revolution up to the Seventies. The Great Stagnation, looked at under the hood, was really the Great Strangulation."
"Over the long run, unchecked regulation destroys the learning curve, prevents innovation, protects and preserves inefficiency, and makes progress run backward. All the reasonable predictions of Golden Age SF and postwar techno-optimism were predicated on the continued growth and affordability of energy. They also presumed an environment of sanity in law and regulation. We had had both throughout the industrial revolution up to the Seventies. The Great Stagnation, looked at under the hood, was really the Great Strangulation."