Big Questions
I'm happy to see the Nobel Prize awarded for research on institutions.
Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson Win Nobel Prize for Institutions and Prosperity
Here’s Acemoglu talking about institutions. I emphasized the bit about political power.
People in power now don’t care about the economic consequences or whether the lot of the people improves if it comes to the preservation of their power. They’ll make regulations to impair the ability of groups or organizations to acquire political power organically if they feel threatened enough.
The elite will pervert institutions, if that’s what they feel they have to do. Institutions like the rule of law (you get a prosecution, but you don’t) or antitrust (Big Tech must be defeated even if we have to invent out of whole cloth new theories of antitrust) suffer.
It’s just this war and that lying son-of-a-bitch Johnson.
‘Why is it that certain different types of institutions stick?….it wouldn’t make sense, in terms of economic growth, to have a set of institutions that ban private property or create private property that is highly insecure, where I can encroach on your rights. But politically, it might make a lot of sense.
‘If I have the political power, and I’m afraid of you becoming rich and challenging me politically, then it makes a lot of sense for me to create a set of institutions that don’t give you secure property rights. If I’m afraid of you starting new businesses and attracting my workers away from me, it makes a lot of sense for me to regulate you in such a way that it totally kills your ability to grow or undertake innovations.
‘So, if I am really afraid of losing political power to you, that really brings me to the politics of institutions, where the logic is not so much the economic consequences, but the political consequences. This means that, say, when considering some reform, what most politicians and powerful elites in society really care about is not whether this reform will make the population at large better off, but whether it will make it easier or harder for them to cling to power.
‘Those are the sort of issues that become first-order if you want to understand how these things work.’ [emphasis added]
SEC's Crypto Regulation Labeled a 'Disaster' by Commissioner
Private actors crave certainty. They’re probably willing to take some regulatory pain if it comes with certainty. Better that than to have to endure volatility and unpredictability in regulation to risk having slightly less difficult regulation.
‘He criticized the SEC’s reliance on “policy through enforcement,” stating that the agency has “done nothing to provide guidance on it.” Uyeda explained that this lack of direction has resulted in courts issuing conflicting rulings on the matter.’
‘The View’ abortion ad signals wider effort to use an FCC regulation to spread a message
The rule forbidding a television network from carrying a political ad with which it disagrees doesn’t apply to cable networks or things set up online like podcasts. It seems arbitrary.
‘An anti-abortion ad that aired during “ The View ” this past week and criticized the show’s personalities was the most visible manifestation of a campaign that is making use of a federal law that forbids broadcasters from turning it down.
‘In the ad, a narrator says, “I am so sick of stupid celebrities and lying journalists,” while the screen shows pictures of “The View” host Whoopi Goldberg, her colleagues and other celebrities, including Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, Robert DeNiro, Billie Eilish, Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow and Dana Bash.
‘The ad compares the celebrities to Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl, criticizes the Americans for their so-called support of abortion rights and includes graphic pictures of aborted fetuses.’
The partial decriminalization of marijuana, if it happens, likely happens in the next Administration because of DEA resistance, what Harris terms “bureaucracy.”
‘Just one day after rolling out a plan to end federal cannabis prohibition, the vice president was asked about the more modest reform of rescheduling—a proposal that the Justice Department formally put forward earlier this year after receiving a recommendation from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
‘She said that the process of reclassifying marijuana has been slower than the administration would like because “we had to work with the DEA.”
‘“There’s a certain level of bureaucracy that exists in the federal government that slows things down,” Harris said. “But essentially to bring down how weed is classified—how marijuana is classified, to make it classified as a lesser harm—that took some time. There’s a whole process around that, but that’s the work that we have done, in addition to work that we have done writ large on criminal justice reform.”’
Auer after Loper Bright, by Chad Squitieri
Loper referred to the Administrative Procedures Act in requiring the court to exercise its “independent judgment” when it came to interpreting. There is a separate doctrine, Auer, that speaks to judicial deference to bureaucrats on non-statutory regulations. The implications of Loper for Auer deference need to be clarified.
‘One might think that the Kisor plurality’s interpretation of Section 706 would have been upset by the Loper Bright majority’s interpretation of Section 706. After all, if Section 706 requires courts to exercise their “independent judgment,” and thus not defer to agencies when interpreting statutes, wouldn’t Section 706 also require courts to similarly exercise their “independent judgment,” and thus not defer to agencies when interpreting regulations? That is certainly a fair (albeit broad) reading of Loper Bright, and I predict that some jurists might adopt that reading as their own. Indeed, as Professor Haley Proctor recently highlighted on this blog: D.C. Circuit Judge Rao has already adopted something quite close to this position—albeit in the context of courts deferring to agency interpretations of contracts, not regulations.’
FCC Republican opposes regulation of data caps with analogy to coffee refills
The FCC Chair is unhappy that some people are unhappy that they can’t have unlimited bandwidth. So, of course, she wants to intervene. The minority commissioners throw out some common sense in response.
‘FCC Republicans Nathan Simington and Brendan Carr dissented from the Notice of Inquiry and released statements blasting what they call an attempt to regulate Internet service rates.
‘Simington argued that regulating data caps would harm customers, using an analogy about the hypothetical regulation of coffee refills:
‘Suppose we were a different FCC, the Federal Coffee Commission, and rather than regulating the price of coffee (which we have vowed not to do), we instead implement a regulation whereby consumers are entitled to free refills on their coffees. What effects might follow? Well, I predict three things could happen: either cafés stop serving small coffees, or cafés charge a lot more for small coffees, or cafés charge a little more for all coffees.’