My first job after law school was at the Federal
Communications Commission in the Common Carrier Bureau. I worked on rulemaking proceedings designed
to deregulate the telecommunications industry.
At that time, many of my fellow progressives were concerned that such deregulation
would hurt the poor. For years, they
had argued that monopolization in that industry was needed to ensure the
universal availability of cheap phone service.
According to this argument, deregulation would unleash the uncaring
forces of a competitive market. This
could benefit affluent consumers, but the poor would be out of luck, as
businesses could hardly expect to profit from subsidizing their phone services.
Being that I was a young man who lacked either a
crystal ball or a sophisticated understanding of telecommunications, I simply
did my job and watched to see what happened.
Soon enough, the picture became clear; I witnessed a deregulation-driven
revolution in telecommunications that has clearly benefited everyone, rich and
poor alike.
That didn’t stop me from being a progressive. But it did stop me from being an ideologue.
For example, I developed a fear of monopolization
and a love for accountability, market-driven or otherwise. Years after I left the FCC, got married and began
raising two daughters, my family took a trip to California. We were staying for a few days with a friend
in San Francisco and I needed to get a parking sticker for my car. We easily spent two hours waiting in line at
a government office to get that stupid little sticker, and I used half of that
time to lecture my daughters about the inherent inefficiencies of government as
a provider of goods and services. Just
think about the last time you visited the Department of Motor Vehicles in your
town. Those needlessly long lines didn’t
just happen overnight; they emerged from decades of complacency and perverse
incentives.
In short, I didn’t want my children to grow up as “progressives”
and not appreciate the limitations of government. I didn’t want them worshiping at the altar of
regulation. But I also didn’t want them
worshiping Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” either. There are times when the free market simply
malfunctions. Upstream companies pollute
and downstream neighbors pay the price.
Executives commit larceny by trick and then hire a bevy of lawyers to
cover up the problem. Consumers fall in
love with dangerous products and suppliers inevitably arise to satisfy that
demand – while innocent third parties are left to pick up the pieces. We see
these patterns as well. That is, if we’re
willing to look with unbiased eyes.
In the last couple of days, I’ve seen a number of
articles that serve as clear reminders of why we need strong government
regulations despite the inherent potential for overreach. Yesterday’s Washington Post contained back-to-back
articles reporting the results of pro-regulation studies that shouldn’t
surprise anyone. One article was
entitled “Study ties loose conceal-carry laws to higher gun death rates.” In other words, if you allow every Tom, Dick
and Harry to secretly pack heat, folks are going to get pissed off from time
and time and shoot somebody. Makes
sense, don’t you think? Another article
was entitled “Study links fewer recurrent concussions in young athletes to new
state laws.” In other words, if you require high school
football players to stop playing when they’ve “just had their bell rung,” maybe
– just maybe – they won’t have their bell rung so often in the future (and they
might not ring your bell as often after they retire from football).
To me, regulating the use of concealed-carry weapons
or the ability of football players to continue playing with concussions is so
obviously needed that it seems almost silly to have to argue the point. And yet there are plenty of folks who oppose
these types of laws because the government would be responsible for making the
laws and enforcing them.
Wednesday’s New York Times had an article about Moran,
Texas, a small town that survives largely because of a plant that manufactures
bump stocks, the gizmos that are widely viewed as being responsible for many
deaths in the recent Las Vegas massacre.
You might not be surprised that in Moran, bump stocks, which
serve to convert semi-automatic into automatic weapons, remain insanely
popular. According to one resident, “Guns don’t kill people. [Bump] ... stocks don’t kill
people. It could have been just as
lethal, if not more so, with a good scope.”
Blah, blah, blah.
Spare me the rationalizations. To
me, the problem is inherent in a capitalist economy. You show me a person with an itch to buy
something crazy and a wallet big enough to pay for it, and I’ll show you a
second person with a willingness to scratch that itch and a hundred
explanations of why they’ve done nothing wrong.
Sometimes, regulation is all
that stands in the way of matching up those two people and ruining innocent lives
in the process.
We live during a time when America is divided into multiple
sub-cultures. In one, government is so
despised that even sensible regulations are viewed with suspicion. In another, the one with which I associate
myself, government isn’t seen as a “necessary evil” at all – just a limited
good. Folks like me recognize that it’s
not government’s job to dominate an economy, for nine times out of ten, the
marketplace truly knows best. But we
also realize that if we let the marketplace decide ten times out of ten, the
results can get very ugly, very dangerous, and very tragic.
When it’s time to go to the ballot box next year, please
listen closely to the way candidates talk about the value of government. Are they respectful? Or do they like to treat government
regulation and government workers like piñatas? Just as the Czars of Russia used to blame
everything on the Jews, some politicians like to blame all of society’s woes on
the public sector. As a 32-year veteran
of public service and a 57-year old Jew, you’ll forgive me if I’m sensitive
about either type of demagoguery.
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