It can. But not by banning lobbying or pretending influence disappears. It reduces capture by changing where incentives and resources sit.

Regulatory capture thrives under two conditions: concentrated benefit and diffuse cost. A small group gains enormously from shaping rules, while the harm is spread thinly across millions. Under those conditions, it is rational for the few to invest heavily in lobbying, and irrational for the many to organize against it.

This is why capture is persistent. It is not just corruption. It is incentive alignment. Universal Basic Assets weakens this pattern indirectly by changing both sides of that equation.

When ownership is concentrated, the incentive to shape rules is enormous. A regulatory tweak can move billions. When ownership is distributed, the payoff for capture shrinks. You can still lobby, but you are lobbying against a much larger base of shared interest.

More importantly, universal ownership creates a counterweight.

When everyone holds a stake in the productive system, the public is no longer merely regulated. It is also invested. That does not automatically make people politically active, but it widens the base of aligned interest. Harmful regulatory capture stops being invisible and starts conflicting with collective return.

This does not eliminate power. It redistributes pressure.

Under concentrated ownership, lobbying is asymmetric. A few actors can afford sustained influence. The public responds episodically, if at all. Under universal ownership, the legitimacy of capture weakens. Decisions that clearly benefit a narrow group at broad expense become harder to justify as “necessary for growth.”

Still, capture does not vanish.

Large organizations will continue to seek advantage. Complexity will still be used to obscure intent. Influence will still concentrate where information is scarce and governance is weak. This is why UBA is not a substitute for political design. It is a precondition for it. By diluting the incentive for capture and widening the base of shared interest, UBA makes governance possible in a way it is not when ownership is narrow. It does not guarantee good outcomes. It makes bad outcomes harder to entrench.

The system shifts from one where power flows almost exclusively upward, to one where pressure is distributed more evenly across society. Capture thrives in silence and asymmetry. UBA reduces both.

Enough to change the balance.

And balance is often the difference between reform being cosmetic and reform being real.