[detbuch]

Originally Posted by RickBomba

Oh Butchie,
I could put footnotes and hyperlinks around any of my kooky theories...it don’t make them any less tin-foil-hatless.

Hell, there might be hope for all of us..look at where Scott Atlas is now. Some people actually put a “Dr.” in front of his name.

Don’t stop believing, Murica.

We are a nation in the middle of a moron sandwich.

My links were not a support of a kooky theory. They were links to what actually exists and how it came to be and why. They are fact and history. Saying they are about kooky theories is like saying that describing the Constitution is describing a kooky theory. The Constitution is not a kooky theory. The administrative state is not a theory. They both actually exist. And one opposes the other.

Remaining ignorant of that, not willing to discuss it, misses the essential political battle, and reduces us to bitching about personalities and concocting enough lies about them to make what insufficient truths that are available seem like the really important catastrophic differences that should decide the election. That leads to the totally hyped, kooky, conspiratorial BS that we've been fed.

The Constitution protects rights that we take for granted. The administrative state nullifies whatever right that stands in the way of implementing what a few deemed "experts" think is good for us. In effect, regulatory agencies within the administrative state have the power to tell us what we have a right to do within their sphere of supposed expertise. And there are well over a hundred such agencies within the American administrative state. Some say as many as 400. Apparently, the total number is not definitively known. The number has blossomed into enough, and wide enough scope, to regulate nearly every aspect of our lives.

But not to worry. They are peopled with politically neutral, honest, experts who don't impose any self-interest and are not susceptible to special interests and always are only trying to administer to the well being of the American people. The only problem with that assessment is that "people," "experts," are human, with all the self-serving flaws that humans are prone to. Even the heads of many agencies are "peopled" by those who came from the businesses they regulate. What could go wrong there?

Well, if degrading the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers is not enough, there is this thing called regulatory capture wherein those large corporations that the are supposed to be the object of regulation actually use the agencies for their own benefit--leading to the dreaded crony capitalist destruction of the middle class and the widening of the dreaded income inequality. Think that's my kooky theory? Here's a large list of quotes on that by "experts" on the subject of something that is not just a theory, but actually exists:

Woodrow Wilson: “If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don’t you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don’t you see that they must capture the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it? ”


Ronald Coase: “When rights, worth millions of dollars, are awarded to one businessman and denied to others, it is no wonder if some applicants [to a regulatory agency] become overanxious and attempt to use whatever influence they have (political and otherwise), particularly as they can never be sure what pressure the other applicants may be exerting.”

Milton Friedman: “the pressure on the legislature to license an occupation rarely comes from the members of the public . . . On the contrary, the pressure invariably comes from the occupation itself.”

Harold Demsetz: “…in utility industries, regulation has often been sought because of the inconvenience of competition.”

Richard Posner: “Because regulatory commissions are of necessity intimately involved in the affairs of a particular industry, the regulators and their staffs are exposed to strong interest group pressures. Their susceptibility to pressures that may distort economically sound judgments is enhanced by the tradition of regarding regulatory commissions as ‘arms of the legislature,’ where interest-group pressures naturally play a vitally important role.”

George Stigler: “…as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefits.” And “Regulation and competition are rhetorical friends and deadly enemies: over the doorway of every regulatory agency save two should be carved: ‘Competition Not Admitted.’ The Federal Trade Commission’s doorway should announce , “Competition Admitted in Rear,” and that of the Antitrust Division, ‘Monopoly Only by Appointment.’”

Theodore J. Lowi, in The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States: “a considerable proportion of federal regulation, regardless of its own claim to consumer protection, has the systematic effect of constituting and maintaining a sector of the economy or the society. These are the policies of receivership by regulation.”

Alfred Kahn: “When a commission is responsible for the performance of an industry, it is under never completely escapable pressure to protect the health of the companies it regulates, to assure a desirable performance by relying on those monopolistic chosen instruments and its own controls rather than on the unplanned and unplannable forces of competition.” “Responsible for the continued provision and improvement of service, [the regulatory commission] comes increasingly and understandably to identify the interest of the public with that of the existing companies on whom it must rely to deliver goods.”

Mark Green and Ralph Nader: “a kind of regular personnel interchange between agency and industry blurs what should be a sharp line between regulator and regulatee, and can compromise independent regulatory judgment. In short, the regulated industries are often in clear control of the regulatory process.”

Richard B. McKenzie and Gordon Tullock: “although regulation is begun with the good intentions of those who promote and pass the laws, somewhere along the line regulators may become pawns of the regulated firms.”

Milton and Rose Friedman: “Every act of intervention establishes positions of power. How that power will be used and for what purposes depends far more on the people who are in the best position to get control of that power and what their purposes are than on the aims and objectives of the initial sponsors of the intervention.”

Barry M. Mitnick: “Much relatively recent research has argued that regulation was often sought by industries for their own protection, rather than being imposed in some ‘public interest.’ Although the distinction is not always made clear in this recent literature, we may add that regulation which is not directly sought at the outset is generally ‘captured’ later on so it behaves with consistency to the industry’s major interests”

Barry Weingast: “Often . . . Agency heads and commission members, anxious to further their careers and goals (including large budgets) as well as completing their own of power and prestige pet projects and policy initiatives, depend upon service to interest their success groups and key committee members for their success.”

George Gilder: “One reason for government resistance to change is that the process of creative destruction can attack not only an existing industry, but also the regulatory apparatus that subsists on it; and it is much more difficult to retrench a bureaucracy than it is to bankrupt a company. A regulatory apparatus is a parasite that can grow larger than its host industry and become in turn a host itself, with the industry reduced to parasitism, dependent on the subsidies and protections of the very government body that initially sapped its strength.”

Bruce Yandle:“what do industry and labor want from the regulators? They want protection from competition, from technological change, and from losses that threaten profits and jobs. A carefully constructed regulation can accomplish all kinds of anticompetitive goals of this sort, while giving the citizenry the impression that the only goal is to serve the public interest.”

Thomas K. McCraw: “Clearly, in passing the Civil Aeronautics Act [of 1938], Congress intended to bring stability to airlines. What is not clear is whether the legislature intended to cartelize the industry. Yet this did happen . . . In fact, over the entire history of the CAB, no new trunkline carrier had been permitted to join the sixteen that existed in 1938. And those sixteen, later reduced to ten by a series of mergers, still dominated the industry in the 1970s. All these companies… developed into large companies under the protective wing of the CAB. None wanted deregulation.”

Robert Higgs: “The government’s regulatory agencies have created or sustained private monopoly power more often than they have precluded or reduced it. This result was exactly what many interested parties desired from government regulation, though they would have been impolitic to have said so in public.”

Jeffrey M. Berry:“The ties between interest groups and [regulatory] agencies can become too close. A persistent criticism by political scientists is that agencies that regulate businesses are overly sympathetic to the industries they are responsible for regulating. Critics charge that regulators often come from the businesses they regulate and thus naturally see things from an industry point of view. Even if regulators weren’t previously involved in the industry, they have been seen as eager to please powerful clientele groups rather than have them complain to the White House or to the agency’s overseeing committees in Congress.”

Jonathan Emord:.“The minutes of the First National Radio Conference in 1922 reveal that even at this early date, industry leaders clamored for government limits on the number of licenses issued; they sought protection against entry by new licenses. For its part, the government desired control over the industry’s structure and programming content . . .The classic rent/content control quid pro quo soon developed: in exchange for regulatory controls on industry structure and programming content, industry leaders would be granted restrictions on market entry that they wanted. These restrictions would ensure monopoly rents for licensees and would provide the government with assurance that the broadcast industry would not oppose regulatory controls.”

David Schoenbrod: Effective participation in agency lawmaking usually requires expensive legal representation as well as close connections to members of Congress who will pressure the agency on one’s behalf. The agency itself is often closely linked with the industry it regulates. Not only large corporations, but also labor unions, cause-based groups, and other cohesive minority interests sometimes can use delegation to triumph over the interests of the larger part of the general public, which lacks the organization, finances, and know-how to participate as effectively in the administrative process.”

Douglass North: “The more successful the interest group becomes the greater the probability that it will be in a position to impact on the policy making process of successive governments. … Aspiring monopolists will retain lobbyists to assure a favourable outcome and devote resources to the acquisition of the monopoly right. A government will more than likely grant monopoly privileges to various groups of politically influential people. Cartels and anti-competitive behaviour will be maintained and politicians will react to the demands of the more vociferous and well organised interest groups.”

Andrew Odlyzko: “It is now widely accepted that the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was not a pure triumph of the populist movement and its allies in the anti-railroad camp. The railway industry largely decided that regulation was in its best interests and acquiesced in and even encouraged government involvement. This is often portrayed as the insidious capture of the regulators by the industry they regulate.”

Lawrence Lessig: “Built into the DNA of the most important agencies created to protect innovation, is an almost irresistible urge to protect the most powerful instead.

The FCC is a perfect example. … With so much in its reach, the FCC has become the target of enormous campaigns for influence. Its commissioners are meant to be “expert” and “independent,” but they’ve never really been expert, and are now openly embracing the political role they play. Commissioners issue press releases touting their own personal policies. And lobbyists spend years getting close to members of this junior varsity Congress.”

Thomas Frank: “The first federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was set up to regulate railroad freight rates in the 1880s. Soon thereafter, Richard Olney, a prominent railroad lawyer, came to Washington to serve as Grover Cleveland’s attorney general. Olney’s former boss asked him if he would help kill off the hated ICC. Olney’s reply, handed down at the very dawn of Big Government, should be regarded as an urtext of the regulatory state: ‘The Commission… is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of the railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things. … The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.'”

Tim Wu:“Again and again in the histories I have recounted, the state has shown itself an inferior arbiter of what is good for the information industries. The federal government’s role in radio and television from the 1920s through the 1960s, for instance, was nothing short of a disgrace…. Government’s tendency to protect large market players amounts to an illegitimate complicity … [particularly its] sense of obligation to protect big industries irrespective of their having become uncompetitive.”

David J. Farber: “When the FCC asserts regulatory jurisdiction over an area of telecommunications, the dynamic of the industry changes. No longer are customer needs and desires at the forefront of firms’ competitive strategies; rather firms take their competitive battles to the FCC, hoping for a favorable ruling that will translate into a marketplace advantage. Customer needs take second place; regulatory “rent-seeking” becomes the rule of the day, and a previously innovative and vibrant industry becomes a creature of government rule-making.”

Holman Jenkins: “When some hear the word ‘regulation,’ they imagine government rushing to the defense of consumers. In the real world, government serves up regulation to those who ask for it, which usually means organized interests seeking to block a competitive threat . . . We should also notice that an astonishingly large part of the world has experienced an astonishing degree of stagnation for an astonishingly long time for exactly such reasons.”

Bruce Schneier: “unless there’s some other career path, pretty much everyone with the expertise necessary to become a regulator will be either a former or future employee of the industry with the obvious implicit and explicit conflicts. As a result, there is a tendency for institutions delegated with regulating a particular industry to start advocating the commercial and special interests of that industry. This is known as regulatory capture, and there are many examples both in the U.S. and in other countries.”

Bruce Owen: “It is rather legislative oversight and budget committees and their chairs that are (willingly) captured by special interests in the first instance. One could equally say that legislators capture the special interests, seeking campaign funding The behavior of regulatory agencies simply reflect the preferences of their congressional masters. Regulators generally seek to please their committees, not to defy them.”


Yes, the administrative state is real, not a kooky theory, and both parties are guilty of supporting what is essentially this fourth and rather independent branch of government. Few Presidents have done much to curb the administrative state--Coolidge, Reagan, Carter a little bit, Trump with deregulation efforts including eliminating business strangling regulations and jumping over the regulatory process to engage private business in manufacturing medical equipment to fight covid and speed up the manufacture of vaccines. But the real fight against it is within conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover institute (which is ironically named since Hoover was a Progressive proponent of government regulation) and the Federalist Society and others. And these institutions hold some influence over the more conservative wing of the Republican Party. The Progressives, in both parties, use the regulators to do what they don't want to be accused of.

And the Progressive left Dems want to replace the constitutional separation of powers with a centralized administrative form of government. They have told us many times in many ways that is their goal.

So that's one of the reasons I will vote Republican, not because Republicans are a paragon of virtue and strict defenders of the Constitution. Between the two parties, they're the one to slow down the Progressive juggernaut and offer any chance to roll back the power of the regulatory agencies and move back power to the people.