Some people may actually disagree that using the term &quot;buy&quot; or &quot;bought&quot; is accurate here, because they may look at the &quot;transaction&quot; and say that the &quot;cost&quot; is not actually a cost.<p>In some cases it is -- paying for government food inspections costs time and money and so there is at minimum the opportunity cost of what else those resources could have been used for.<p>But some things that people say are &quot;costs&quot; -- hindrances on employment, keeping the number of professionals in a certain field artificially low -- may not be viewed as costs. Some may say it&#x27;s good to have a throttle on employment in field X, not just because of licensing, but because making it super easy to jump into X is just not desirable for anyone and it&#x27;s too easy for uncredentialed Xers to rip unsuspecting people off, or something.<p>I personally feel this way about Uber and Lyft services (but my opinion could change when self-driving cars become a part of that service). I&#x27;d love it if there were heavy licensing regulations for Uber&#x2F;Lyft, and for drivers. I genuinely think everyone would be better off, and the &quot;cost&quot; of there not being an extremely liquid market for new drivers is actually not a real cost, that liquid market is more harmful for everyone than it is beneficial. We essentially get two &quot;wins&quot; -- regulated drivers leading to more safety, and regulated drivers leading to slightly slower pipeline of introduction of new drivers.