Monthly Archives: April 2013

A Story with Neither Style nor Substance

Posted on April 4, 2013 | Comments Off

President Obama Nominee’s ‘Ugly’ Hair Investigated

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Posted in General Foolishness, Political Animals

The Origin of Interest Groups

Posted on April 2, 2013 | Comments Off

It has always been fashionable to lament the decline of morals and decency. Every generation has had some variation of the “kids these days” trope. Applying this folk wisdom to modern century politics, the rise of special-interest groups during the 20th century must certainly have been a disturbing development to witness. Even today, it seems like pressure groups grow more powerful with every election cycle. What is happening to our democracy?

Whatever is going on, moral decay has little to do with it. On pp. 285-6 of their classic Calculus of Consent, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock offer a much more realistic theory on why K Street is what it is:

A hypothesis explaining the increasing importance of the pressure group over the last half century need not rest on the presumption of a decline in the public morality. A far simpler and much more acceptable hypothesis is that interest-group activity, measured in terms of organizational costs, is a direct function of the “profits” expected from the political process by functional groups.

In other words, if the amount of money in politics disturbs you, then you should advocate for less politics. Just as bank robbers go where the money is, so do rent-seekers.

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Posted in Books, Economics, Political Animals, Public Choice

CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Posted on April 1, 2013 | Comments Off

This week in the world of regulation:

Last week, 100 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is down from 60 new final rules the previous week.
That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every hour and 41 minutes — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
All in all, 826 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,426 new final rules.
Last week, 1,526 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 19,362 pages.
At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 79,353 pages.
Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. For the third week in a row, no such rules were published, keeping the total at 10 so far in 2013.
The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $2.632 billion to $4.910 billion.
So far, 67 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
So far this year, 151 final rules affect small business; 20 of them are significant rules.