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I Want a President Who’ll Dump the Stupid FCC
Christopher Chantrill / American Thinker
It was the Progressive Era that invented independent regulatory agencies. We needed an Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate those railroads. The noble idea was that we needed independent experts to protect the helpless farmer from the greed of the railroad barons. We needed a watchdog that was free of both of partisan taint and political patronage and also free from influence by corporate power.
Of course that was always a conceit. What the Progressives really meant was that they wanted the jumped-up teenage clerks (Rockefeller) and teenage surveyors (Jay Gould) to be supervised by the right sort of people — in other words, people like them.
Ever since, the independent regulatory agencies, the ICCs, the FTCs, the CABs, the FCCs, the FECs, the SECs, the NLRBs, have reliably churned forth conventional elite wisdom and reliably bollixed up perfectly viable industries like railroads, airlines, broadcasting, electioneering, finance, labor relations.
When un-settled scientists looking for new pastures invented the field of public choice theory one of their targets of opportunity was the regulatory agencies. Out of their research they developed a notion they called “regulatory capture.” Regulatory agencies tend over time, they reported, to become the friends of the people they regulate, and start to see the world in the same way as the regulated. They become, as the Brits say, “not fit for purpose.” Call it human nature.
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