Big Government

CPSIA, Yet Again

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I’ve posted several times about the horrible piece of legislation known as the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act, which has been devastating to many small manufacturers–especially makers of children’s clothing, toys, science kits, etc–and homecrafters. (It has also had a malign impact on the children’s book industry and on libraries.) In today’s WSJ, Virginia Postrel has a good article on this legislation and its effects.

Postrel observes that the recently-enacted Food Safety Modernization Act does a better job than did the CPSIA of exempting small operators from burdensome and unnecessary record-keeping requirements, and attributes this to the fact that the agricultural industry is far better organized from a lobbying standpoint than are the small manufacturers who are impacted by the CPSIA. (Also, the kind of well-connected people for whom grocery shopping is a religious experience are more likely to have concerns about protecting small farmers than about protecting small manufacturers and homecrafters.)

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Profit!

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Ford earned greater profits in 2010 than it had in a decade. But weren’t they the only major US automaker who refused to take government bailout money?

Of course, Ford’s sales situation could have been much rosier than the others when the bailout was proposed. Their refusal then and profits now are hardly surprising if that is so.

There is no excuse for (purportedly) being surprised by this.

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Progressives laudably seek to oppose injustice by deploying government power as a countervailing force against the imagined oppressive and exploitative tendencies of market institutions. Yet it seems that time and again market institutions find ways to use the government’s regulatory and insurer-of-last-resort functions as countervailing forces against their competitors and, in the end, against the very public these functions were meant to protect.
 
We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation. For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism.

The Economist, Democracy in America blog Via Mickey Kaus, via Instapundit.

Kaus’s proposed reforms can’t hurt. But the mindset has to change. Conservatives will have to figure out that being “pro business” and being “pro market” and “pro freedom” will often be in opposition. Big Business wants a regulatory state to insulate it from competition. That is rational self-interest. And it is anti-market.

Corporate capture of state power is the inevitable and (should be) well-known consequence of creating state power in the first place. Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson warned about this in the late 1700s, and the liberal thinkers throughout the 19th Century were acutely aware of this problem. (See, e.g., this book) The Founders knew this, and built a central government of limited powers for exactly this reason, with the mercantilist, politically-connected monopolies of Britain very much in mind. In the mid-20th Century, Mancur Olson, James Buchanan and George Stigler, among many others, documented and demonstrated that the regulatory state will be in the hands of the supposedly regulated parties based solely on the incentives and knowledge of all the parties.

Regulatory capture is folk wisdom, not arcane knowledge. It is inevitable.

No one can honestly smack their forehead and say “d’oh!”

There is no excuse for being surprised by this.

UPDATE: Our Nomenklatura, Via Instapundit.

Funding Corruption

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According to this news item, Republicans in the US House of Representatives are vowing to cut payments to the United Nations. Of greater interest to me is the promise of investigations into corruption.

There was a great deal of drama over the UN soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Humanitarian programs were seen as chances for graft and bribes, and resolutions against Iraq certainly did nothing to convince Saddam to abide by the peace agreement that ended Gulf War I. Why does the American taxpayer pony up more than 20% of the United Nation’s budget if the organization is nothing but a toothless waste of time that is run by a collection of criminals?

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Wave Of The Future

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One of the big topics of discussions in the right side of the blogosphere lately has been how the pay and benefits of public employees has contributed to the current fiscal emergency our nation now faces. Of particular interest is how unfunded pensions are causing a budget crises every fiscal year.

The Buckeye Institute, which the local news media dubbed a “conservative think tank” here in Ohio, has a searchable database that lists the salary of every public school teacher in this state. They even go so far as to include the estimated pensions that the educators have coming.

This will probably become something that every state will have, and it has been a long time coming.