alt Hacker NewsPerfect regulatory capture is like putting a toddler in charge of your household - corporate organisms, like toddlers, do not know what is good for them, and are not willing to accept short term pain for long term gain.
I see parallels with unions in the U.K. in the 70s, as they were ultimately the controlling entity of a lot of industry - and they too were unwilling to accept short term pain for long term gain, which ultimately resulted in the collapse of British manufacturing, as money that should have been reinvested in plant upgrades and technology instead disappeared into exorbitant - unfathomable by today’s standards - pension plans and pay packets.
Anyway. I suppose this is just humans 101, and today it’s the German car industry insisting that eating their body weight in candy today will have no consequences tomorrow.
Unions don't exist to protect the industry or maximize industrial gain, they exist to get as much as they can for the most senior members of the union (with union leadership being at the top) and proportionally less the less senior you are. By design they are more than happy for individual companies or even large swaths of industry to disappear if it means more spoils for the senior members in the short term.