What are you talking about? Regulatory capture assumes a working rule of law, and describes a process by which people subject to the rules of the game try to rewrite them. In corrupt developing countries the power owns the rules outright, and regulatory capture is no longer a process. I guess you could call it "trivial regulatory capture" but it won't get you any Nobel Prizes. The theory was developed by Chicago School economists who liked to criticize big government.
Regulatory capture has always been a bug of advanced, sufficiently honest societies. This is important because it tells us that well-intentioned rule of law is insufficient for running a democracy if you're not paying attention. I don't think anyone at the FDA wakes up and says, "I think I'll spend today getting in the way of good medical care and helping big pharma make money."
The problem is the privatization of critical infrastructure, a cancer spreading all over the world.
To quote the last sentence of the article: "Many academic physicians are required by their universities to generate a substantial portion of their salaries by obtaining research grants."
Healthcare, basic transportation, energy and water distribution as well as basic telecommunication infrastructure must be in the hands of the state. The free market has massively failed in each of these areas, everywhere in the world. Just look at the US electricity grid, the Berlin water privatization disaster (less service, more expensive), the US (and partially, German too) broadband Internet service, the Berlin S-Bahn problems, the (recently HN frontpaged) problems in the US healthcare system...
Why can't we learn from the countless mistakes made all over the world?!
I think we have learned from the mistake made all around the world, particularly the ones where government run organizations lose billions of dollars through their shoddy operation of industries.
Regulatory capture has always been a bug of advanced, sufficiently honest societies. This is important because it tells us that well-intentioned rule of law is insufficient for running a democracy if you're not paying attention. I don't think anyone at the FDA wakes up and says, "I think I'll spend today getting in the way of good medical care and helping big pharma make money."