Remember Regulator, You're Useless

Kevin Williamson National Review January 11, 2011

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Kevin D. Williamson

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January 11, 2011 4:00 A.M.

Welcome to Washington, Mr. Smith, and welcome to the Agency. I salute your determination to apply common sense in Washington, to fix what’s broken in order to serve the public interest and the common good. Weirdly enough, everybody in Washington wants to do that: Republicans, Democrats, Tea Party patriots, Barney Frank. These guys don’t agree on much, but they all sincerely want to do what’s best for the country, pretty much to a man. I know, I know: Counterintuitive, right? But you’ll see.

In fact, one of the shocking things about Washington is how little cynical self-service there turns out to be. Okay, Charlie Rangel I’ll give you, and those ethanol bastards. But Rangelism is rarer than you’d think. The head-clutching paradox is that 536 elected Washingtonians and endless phalanxes of well-meaning appointees such as yourself wring such hideously wretched results out of such idealistic intentions. There is an explanation for that — so, if you’ll forgive me for the spoilsportsmanship and for tempering your understandably high post-appointment spirits with some gritty reality, it is my duty to inform you: You do not know what you are doing. Probably never will. You do not even know what you are talking about, and I mean that literally.

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When you said in your hearing that you wanted to enact common sense reforms to protect the public interest, what I heard was this: “I want to regulate.” When you said “I want to reduce the red tape,” what I heard was, “I want different tape in a different shade of cerise or persimmon or coquelicot.” That is what it’s really about, even though Washington, D.C., is full of people denouncing all the damned regulations coming out of Washington, D.C. These new yokels may want to repeal Obamacare — I hope they do! — but they are going to replace it with something. Many elected officials in Washington stopped using the word “regulate” around 1984 (a 49-state landslide will get Washington’s attention) and started using it again around 2008 (so will a 49-state financial crisis). (The outlier was Minnesota in the first case, Texas in the second. Executive Summary: Swedes and Garrison Keillor types in Minnesota, 20 percent down payments in Texas. Have your staff bring you up to speed.) When you say “regulate,” normally you mean regulate private enterprises, whether those are businesses, voluntary associations, or other aspects of private life. Why do you want to regulate private enterprises? (No, that was rhetorical.) Because you want them to serve the public interest.

But you have no real idea what the public interest is. Nobody really does. How could you? How would you find out? (No, not rhetorical.) You could take a poll and see what the public says it wants, but what the public says it wants at any particular moment is not identical with the public interest. The public is made up of individuals, most of whom have no better idea what is in the best interest of people they have never met and know nothing about than you do — and practically all of whom will lie when asked what it is they really want: They’ll say they want opera broadcasts and educational programming and organic chard and more foreign news in the newspaper, but in real life their revealed preferences are pretty much classic rock, fantasy-football stats, and those heinous seven-layer burritos from Taco Bell.

So Washington’s understanding of the public interest is a little hazy, inevitably. It’s hard to see the big picture, but you can sometimes get a look at a tiny slice of the public interest. Private enterprises, and businesses especially, usually do serve something that might deserve to be called the public interest or the common good, because they create social value. How do we know they create social value? Mostly because of this so-obvious-it’s-ingenious, but still kind of counterintuitive, idea that comes from economics: If people in society did not in fact value what these businesses were producing, they would not give them their money. Social value = the stuff society actually values. The counterintuitive part, at least for you guys who graduated near the top of your classes at very prestigious law schools and made a lot of money in litigation or bond-counsel work or whatever but have not spent a lot of time selling hotdogs or landscaping or painting houses, is this: Profits are evidence of the creation of social value, not deductions from the sum of the common good. Washington totally flubbed that one during the health-care debate. Enormous profits come from the creation of enormous social value. Exxon, for instance. Americans may not have cozy feelings toward Big Oil, but given a choice between free gas for a year from the local Exxon station or lunch with a bigfoot politician, most Americans would just pick up a Slim Jim on their way to fill up on gratis high-test and motor on down the road and take a rain check on the coq au vin with Senator Snout.

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Remember Regulator, You're Useless

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