Bureaucracy and Regulation

The Beef Trust, the pure-food coalition, and the American Medical Association: three campaigns waged in the name of public health.

Barred from rate associations after 1897, the railroads formed communities of interest by buying their competitors’ stock—cartels in a disguised form.

Patrick Newman traces the Federal Trade Commission’s cartelizing arc: “advance advice,” uniform cost accounting, a brief Wilson reversal, Harding-Coolidge recapture, and Hoover’s subsidies and patent restrictions.

The top AI CEOs aren't acting like they genuinely believe their technology will soon cause human extinction. But they are acting like the successful cartelizers of history, who recognized that state power is the best way to protect market dominance.

After the merger wave of 1898 and 1899, big business wanted relief from antitrust suits and protection from price-cutting.

Tate Fegley argues that government schools fail to teach sound economics not necessarily out of malice, but because they have no incentive to teach

As governments grow in size and power, some come to believe that this growth can go on indefinitely. But state power, too, has its limitations.

Modern civil rights laws and policies have made a large number of people better off. However, the beneficiaries are not the people that the civil rights establishment claims to be helping. No one understands this better than the great economist, Thomas Sowell.

When government regulates or produces electricity, it claims to act in the name of conservation, or preventing “profligacy” by customers. Yet, only free markets can decide what is “profligate” and what is not.

Labor unions and the general public almost totally ignore the essential role played by falling prices in achieving rising real wages.