From the 125th anniversary WSJ edition. John Cochrane writes,
Washington is stuck because that serves its interests. Long laws and vague regulations amount to arbitrary power. The administration uses this power to buy off allies and to silence opponents. Big businesses, public-employee unions and the well-connected get subsidies and protection, in return for political support. And silence: No insurance company will speak out against ObamaCare or the Department of Health and Human Services. No bank will speak out against Dodd-Frank or the Securities and Exchange Commission. Agencies from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Internal Revenue Service wait in the wings to punish the unwary.
…in the end, only an outraged electorate will bring change—and growth.
That is a dire outlook, given my lack of faith in democracy. Right now, the only outraged electorate is the Tea Party, and (a) much of their outrage is currently directed at the immigration issue, which is not central to the crony capitalism that concerns Cochrane, and (b) they are strongly opposed by the forces of the establishment, particularly in the media.
Peter Huber writes,
Washington’s drug-approval process, grounded as it is in a one-size-fits-all perspective on how drugs are supposed to operate, and anchored in clinical-trial protocols and statistical methods developed decades ago, is lagging far behind the science. We need a regulatory process that can keep pace with a rapid proliferation of highly customized therapies that are grounded in a mechanistic understanding of molecular biology. This will require fundamental changes in clinical-trial protocols and in the type of evidence that is required for drug approval.
Richard Epstein writes,
we have to bid farewell to the egalitarian mantra that we can lift the nation up out of its doldrums by raising minimum wages to living wages, by tightening overtime regulation, by strengthening public and private unions, by expanding family-leave protection, by continuing with aggressive enforcement of the antidiscrimination laws based on race, sex and age, by imposing a health-care mandate on employers, and by extending unemployment benefits. The tragic truth is that these feel-good measures hit hardest at the bottom end of the labor markets, especially minority teenagers desperate to gain work experience.
You’re right – there is no outraged electorate, because most people still think things are “manageable” so long as they don’t get bogged down, completely. And the tendency is to react to what one does not want, rather than build on what one wants. Only the problem is, by the time people are ready to react and do something, often the economic complexities which need to be preserved, are already breaking down, because the gridlock and the complacency has gone on too long.
Arnold implies that much of the Tea Party energy is misdirected toward the immigration issue, “which is not central to the crony capitalism that concerns Cochrane.” Through some strange coincidence, however, the crony capitalists (as well as many honest capitalists, to be sure) are united in support of legalizing the “undocumented” immigrants already here and radically liberalizing our immigration policies going forward (and US immigration policies are already the most liberal of any major country on earth, if I’m not mistaken).
What effect will the transformation of the electorate that will result from the immigration “reform” favored by our benevolent bipartisan ruling class (and their libertarian/free-marketeer cheerleaders on this issue) have on the likelihood of an effective political opposition to crony capitalism ever being mounted? If you think the opposition is struggling now, just wait until we have a social structure similar to that of Mexico or Brazil.
“given my lack of faith in democracy”
Is this a “lack of faith” in any kind of democracy? Do you consider freedom and democracy to be incompatible?
Is there a bigger crony capitalism racket in this country than the cheap labor racket? And if you think the corruption and concentrated power is bad now, wait until this country turns into northern Mexico.