This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 9, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When innovation requires navigating a complex system of entrenched interests and bureaucratic stamps of approval.

Many would-be innovators are left to find something else to do, and the world is poorer for

it.

Adam Theerer is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and author of permissionless innovation.

We spoke last week.

The disgraced politician Anthony Wiener now has a column at Business Insider and he wrote a recent column about Tesla, the high-end electric

car manufacturer and dealer, and he closes his column with this.

Tesla and these other tech disruptors

might want to put more of their energy

into finding ways to fit their innovations into existing regulations.

And that seems to be sort of a microcosm of an attitude that you talk about in your book.

That's exactly right. It's a sort of mother may I approach that we all too often see among politicians and a lot of academics

that is otherwise known as the precautionary principle.

The precautionary principle has a lot of usage in the field of

health and safety and environmental law but in the field of information

technology and other innovations the precautionary principle is also at work.

And the precautionary principle basically says that new innovation should be curtailed or

maybe even discouraged until such a point in time then they can be proven to be perfectly safe

or there's no theoretical harm to individuals, institutions, business models, norms,

whatever else.

...