The regulatory state is killing property ownership

The only really useful definition of property ownership is that you can sell it. Pass it on to someone else for some price that you consider acceptable. This being something that the regulatory state is rather extinguishing:

The US chipmaker Nvidia is losing hope of completing the $40bn (£30bn) takeover of Britain’s Arm as its regulatory woes mount, leaving it facing a significant break fee.

Nvidia executives are understood to have become increasingly gloomy about the prospects of the takeover, which is yet to be cleared by a single regulator 16 months after the deal was announced.

Watchdogs in China have only recently started to formally review the deal, while a US government legal challenge seeking to block the sale is not due to begin until August – a month before the two-year deadline on the deal expires.

We’ve no opinion on the specifics here. Whether ARM should be owned by the American Nvidia, the Japanese Softbank or should have remained, as some would insist, as a British stock market quoted company. That’s not our point.

It is that with up to 200 countries willing and able to stick their oar in it’s not obvious that Softbank does in fact own ARM. It’s certainly not able to dispose of what is called its property in a manner it finds acceptable at a price that it clearly is happy with.

Of course there are those who think that bureaucrats second guessing the market will lead to a better world. But we would like to remind of something really rather important. The one big - and really, the only important - question in economics is what the heck happened in 1750? A useful if not entirely complete answer being that that was when property rights started to be taken seriously as an individual decision rather than one determined by that societal equivalent of bureaucrats in offices.

Another way to put this is that economic growth is change. Changing what is done, how, by whom. Sticking years long reviews by the world’s assembled clipboard wielders into the process slows that economic growth. By definition it does, for slower change is that definition of slower growth.

Theswe reviews of who may sell what to whom are making us all poorer. We should stop doing this for who does want to be poorer?