This is going to depend heavily on what type of rule you're talking about. This doesn't make much sense without context. Do you think banks are happy when they have to comply with Dodd-Frank or Sarbox? The answer is no.
i was mainly referring to rules that congress and regulators create through their normal course of business. you're right that crises will give rule-makers more political capital than they would otherwise have, and thus will be able to create rules that industry opposition normally would have quashed. dodd-frank was a response to the financial crisis. congress had tons of political capital and could get away with being very harsh, so obviously even the biggest banks were not going to like some of what that political capital bought. big companies didn't like some of the rules in the wake of enron either. even still, the tbtf banks have done a lot of work behind the scenes to file down some of the more ambitious rules. and the tbtf banks are still in better financial shape to cover the costs compared to smaller regional banks that do not qualify for exemptions.
It's crazy to think that people want to increase their costs by using regulations as an anti-competitive mechanism when there's so many other and cheaper ways to engage in anti-competitive behavior that don't involve any negative impact, and in fact will help your bottom line.
uhhh anti-competitive practices are illegal under the antitrust statutes and would attract attention from the justice department or ftc. companies tend to run afoul of antitrust statutes either when the whole industry is doing poorly and the players decide to collude, or inadvertently when an extremely popular product gives them market power. you never see successful companies intentionally violate antitrust statutes because they don't need to break the rules to be successful, and needlessly inviting that scrutiny would be reckless (and in case it wasn't obvious, you can't violate antitrust statutes until you are big because small to medium sized companies do not have market power. so becoming huge by violating the antitrust statutes would be impossible).
regulations are perfectly legal, obviously, and the cost to the biggest company is a smaller proportion of revenue compared to its competitors (unless the rule exempts some competitors, as they sometimes do for very small companies). the compliance cost as a proportion of revenue (i.e. what matters in terms of profitability, which is what investors care about) is absolutely less than that of its most immediate smaller competitors that do not qualify for size exemptions. ergo more rules would increase the biggest company's competitive advantage (since the companies that qualify for exemptions are not an immediate threat due to lack of scale). this is a no-brainer for the biggest company.
No, they're not.
Yes, almost all rules carry with them at the very least some type of opportunity cost, and most have actual direct financial costs as well.
That's a very imprecise and largely incorrect understanding of what laws and regulations are and do. Rules =/= equal costs. What's the additional cost of adding WARNING CHOKING HAZARD to the bottom of your product if it's a choking hazard?
The cost of an attorney to make sure there aren't any other warnings or instructions that need to be added, and to decide how they should be worded and where they should go to ensure that the warnings are sufficiently clear and conspicuous.
What's the added cost of not being able to fire someone simply because they're black or gay? (if they're a bad employee its another story)
a potential lawsuit every time you need to fire or lay off a black or gay person. the facts may completely justify firing the person, but that in itself won't avoid a lawsuit if the former employee doesn't see it that way. this one could very well never impose a financial cost on the employer, but the details of how the employer is affected is very important in accurately calculating this cost.
A lot of rules are like that - little to no added cost and a benefit to the consumer
legal costs could very well be substantial and undeserved. and attorney fees tied to the warning label already do have substantial costs.
your line of argument completely ignores that a regulation could actually have a beneficial effect on the consumer or society.
i never said that the benefit of having a rule could never overcome the rule's inherent costs (and i would appreciate it if you would be more careful in attributing assertions to my argument going forward). but the point is that even rules that confer benefits come with some amount of these costs, and these costs must be considered before we can decide whether the rule creates a net social benefit. if you say that a rule is good without looking at these costs, then your line of argument completely ignores that a regulation could actually have a detrimental effect on society.
So while it's a compelling story that I'm sure gets a lot of people in the anti-government corner, there's just not much truth to it.
i don't know how much clearer i can be in describing this fairly straight-forward concept. it's definitely not that you're stupid, but it's also apparent that you really don't want to understand how regulations could benefit giant companies. making the connection is going to require you not rejecting it outright. for someone who correctly pointed out that dodd-frank and sarbanes-oxley were opposed by the giant companies, it really shouldn't be this difficult to see how a large company with economies of scale can comply with a rule more cost-efficiently than a smaller company without those cost advantages.
The article you linked to outright says that "The bill exempts businesses that have less than $1 million a year in sales." Doesn't this pretty directly cut against your argument that Amazon is supporting this regulation to put the little guys out of business?
my argument is that amazon wants this legislation because it would be able to comply with the rule more cost-efficiently than its smaller competitors, thus giving amazon more of a competitive advantage. amazon had $92 billion in sales over the past year, so in theory this rule will give amazon a cost advantage over non-exempt online merchants with sales less than $92 billion (although obviously the economies of scale advantage gets lower the closer a merchant's sales get to $92 billion).