Evidence trap

A market condition in which proving that a product works is expensive and offering an unvalidated substitute is legal, so the evidence bar operates as a tax on the honest product and selection runs against the thing that proved itself. The bar attaches to what a product holds itself out to do rather than to how it works, which is why silence is cheaper than proof. A second tax follows and is rarely budgeted for, since validation requires reproducible output and the resulting determinism reads as archaic beside an unvalidated fluent competitor.