There is a form of corruption that requires no bribery, secrecy, or explicit illegality. It operates within the rules, speaks the language of expertise, and presents itself as protection. It is called institutional capture: the point at which the body created to regulate begins to function according to the interests of those it was meant to regulate. This does not happen because of individual moral failure, but because of a structural alignment of incentives. The regulator does not “turn into a villain”; it simply begins to write rules with its next market position in mind. That is when regulation stops being risk containment and becomes a product.
The engine of this process is the revolving door. When a regulator knows that their future career depends on the sector they currently oversee, the rule is born with the appearance of public defense and a private logic. It does not prohibit; it makes things more expensive. It does not block; it selects. It does not prevent abuse; it merely renders it “compliant.” The rhetoric speaks of safety, but the real effect is to create barriers that only those already inside can afford to cross. Regulation becomes an economic filter disguised as technical prudence.
Capture does not need to deceive the public directly. It only needs to shift the axis of the debate. While the discussion revolves around “whether something is dangerous,” the real decision has already been made on another plane: who bears the cost. And cost rarely appears in official discourse. It shows up in delays, exclusions, humiliating bureaucracy, silent failures, and statistical deaths that never make headlines. When cost becomes the system’s hidden language, politics ceases to be moral and becomes accounting—far from collective conscience.
This pattern is not exclusive to the state. Digital platforms operate as private micro-states, with opaque rules, automated punishments, and invisible courts. They do not prohibit behaviors; they reorganize the environment until certain choices become unviable. Freedom is not taken by force; it is merely made expensive until it turns abstract. The logic is identical to captured regulation: apparent neutrality, interested design, concentrated profit, and distributed obedience.
The recurring mistake is to treat capture as a problem of character. It is not. Good people, placed in systems that reward bad behaviors, produce bad outcomes efficiently. The problem is architectural. Indignation does not solve it. Performative transparency does not either. The real antidote is incentive engineering: redistributing frictions so the system stops rewarding capture and starts penalizing it.
This begins by turning the revolving door into a long, traceable, and public corridor. Not symbolic cooling-off periods, but real time for cooling and full visibility of professional trajectories. When the path is long, favors lose immediate value; when it is illuminated, promises lose their hidden value. This is not moralism; it is social physics: visible incentives are less negotiable.
The second step is to abandon transparency of intention and adopt transparency of cost. Every new rule should be born accompanied by a simple, mandatory fact sheet: who proposed it, who benefits directly, how much compliance costs, and what the likely human cost of error, exclusion, or delay will be. When this becomes standard, rhetoric shrinks. It becomes difficult to call “safety” what is, in practice, income protected by regulation.
The third element is to slow down decisions that benefit a few. Capture loves urgency, because haste pushes decisions into offices and expels the public from the time needed to understand and react. Processes with minimum timelines, automatic periodic reviews, and sample-based audits reduce the chance that a rule is born perfect for one group and toxic for the rest of society.
There is also a factor almost always ignored: prestige. As long as moving into the regulated sector is treated as the natural crowning of a career, capture will continue to be trained from day one. When, instead, remaining in public service, building institutional competence, and delivering measurable results for citizens generate more status, power, and reward, the revolving door loses glamour and gains suspicion. Behavior changes without the need for heroes.
At its core, what is at stake is the maturity of the political system. Adult democracies do not rely on good intentions; they rely on mechanisms that work even when governed by imperfect people. Effective politics is not a moral soap opera; it is incentive infrastructure. And infrastructure only works when it is designed not to fail silently.
If you want a final image: institutional capture is an elegant casino where the chips are called “protection.” The house always wins because it wrote the rules, controls the pace, and has even convinced the public that losing is part of the game. The way out is not to smash the casino in a shout, but to demand the ledger, replace the croupier when he gets too close to the savvy gambler, and redesign the game so that victory is no longer automatic.
