Innovation is selectively restrained in systems controlled by vested interests.

Just as everyone supports “solutions” until the solutions crush their share of the swag, everybody supports innovation and transparency (IT) until IT disrupts their share of the swag. Then they scramble to hide the ugly truths and suppress the spread of threatening innovation.

This parallel rejection of swag-crushing solutions and innovation/transparency by vested interests is not coincidental: innovation and transparency are the heart of real solutions.

It's not surprising that the Status Quo craves pseudo-solutions, for real solutions necessarily disrupt the corrupt, sclerotic, wasteful, inefficient, fraud-ridden and cronyist-paradise of vested interests. “Faster, better, cheaper” does not result in larger bureaucracies of do-nothing paper-pushers or multiplying crony-parasites. Rather, “faster, better, cheaper” destroys the friction of vested interests.

There's no other way to become “faster, better, cheaper” than to destroy the costs of the current arrangement.

While the disruptive impact of technological innovation is widely appreciated (and feared by despots and vested interests alike), less well-understood is the critical importance of the quality and distribution of transparency and innovation.

While apologists for vested interests will claim the U.S. economy is transparent, they fail to account for the poor quality of the transparency. All sorts of economic vital signs are collected and issued by government and private sources, but the quality of these statistics is suspect.

The unspoken reality is that the vast majority of these statistics are collected and organized to present the most bullish case possible. House sales typically reflect the number of initial offers, not the number of sales that closed escrow, because the first number will always be larger than the second number.