Who Are the Zero-Sum Winners?

09 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by pnuetz in Big Government, rent seeking

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Caveat Emptor, Compliance Costs, Consumer Sovereignty, Drug Prohibition, Economic Rents, Energy subsidies, Farm Subsidies, Monopoly Rents, Mutually Beneficial Trade, Public Aid, Public goods, Public Lottery, Public Trough, Regulatory Rents, rent seeking, Social Security, Subsidies, Tax Deductibility, Zero-Sum Economics

Productive effort seldom goes unrewarded, but all too often rewards are directed to nonproductive activities and secured in ways that are outright takings of resources and rights from others. These are zero-sum propositions at best, as the rewards come only at equivalent or greater costs to others. Gains from zero-sum activities are often purely consumptive in nature and tend to foster more destructive behavior. A clear-cut example is outright thievery, but there are many cases in which, by matters of degree, the perpetrators are not even dimly aware that their gains bring harm to others.

Sadly, our society has undergone a transition to a state in which everyone collects ongoing streams of zero-sum rewards, which are, by definition, at someone else’s (and often our own) expense. The turbulence caused by this unnecessary and avoidable mix of costs and rewards is all too real for consumers and businesses, but again, they don’t always fully grasp its dysfunctional nature.

The Way To Positive Sums

Of course, there are winners and losers in almost any area of economic life. Even when two individuals engage in mutually beneficial exchange, an otherwise win-win situation, other traders might regret missing out on the deal. Pleasing buyers more effectively than one’s competitors might force those rivals to turn to other pursuits. That’s all for the best from a social point of view, unless they can come up with an even better idea to win back customers. In this way, things can keep getting better and better for everyone, even for the one-time losers who are free to compete in trades to which they are better suited. Winners, then, are defined by their success in creating value for others. These are the productive winners. But again, material success doesn’t always come so honorably.

Bobbing For Booty?

Purely “consumptive” or zero-sum winners might be simple crooks who are able to avoid apprehension, or perhaps they are dishonest business-people who sell goods with hidden defects or inferior workmanship. There are many degrees here: a talented salesperson with shoddy merchandise might compromise on price. A clever product manager might reduce the size of a package slightly without reducing price.

A simple gamble is zero-sum in a purely monetary sense, but both gamblers do it for enjoyment, so there are psychic gains involved. A successful gambler might be a zero-sum winner in a monetary sense, but luck usually runs out on honest players. A cheater qualifies as a zero-sum winner. Conversely, it’s not correct to say that casinos are strictly zero-sum winners, though the odds are always stacked in favor of the house and everyone knows it. Casino patrons enjoy the experience, including other amusements available in casinos, so they are often happy customers despite their losses. They are engaging in mutually beneficial exchange.

Private Affairs Made Public

A short-hand description encompassing much of our zero-sum havoc is “the public trough”. Many zero-sum rewards have arisen out of legislative battles, court cases, and regulatory actions restricting private decision-making and encroaching on private property rights. The unremitting tendency is for expansion of these kinds of actions. Where there are zero-sum winners at the public trough, or an opportunity to expand the trough itself, there are always more covetous seekers of zero-sum winnings, otherwise known as rent seekers. They are reliable promoters of “do-something-ism” relative to the outrage du jour through more legislation, lawsuits, and regulatory filings. The tragic thing about rent seeking is that the process itself consumes resources and undermines private incentives, thereby transforming zero-sum outcomes into wasteful, negative-sum outcomes.

Winners At the Trough

There are many kinds of zero-sum winners at the public trough. The winning and losing often occur separately and asynchronously, connected only by an enabling authority who sets rules and funds winners from proceeds taken from losers. For this reason, it is easy for citizens to lose track of the “zero-sumness” of the many benefits they receive. After all, the government can deliver things for “free”, right? And the connection between one’s obligations, losses, and the gains reaped by others is not always obvious.

All of the following involve some degree of zero-sum activity, and all attract rent seekers:

Public aid in exchange for no contribution to output, funded by zero-sum losing taxpayers.
Subsidies for politically-favored technologies that are otherwise uneconomic, funded by zero-sum losing taxpayers.
Farm subsidies when too much is produced and the output is not highly valued, leading to an overallocation of resources to agricultural activity and rents for farmers funded by zero-sum losing taxpayers.
Complex regulatory and tax rules generate income for compliance advisors such as attorneys, accountants, and consultants. Those are rents, pure and simple, paid for by parties who must comply under penalty of law.
Regulatory advantage conferred upon firms sufficiently large or dominant to afford compliance. That penalizes smaller competitors and undermines their market position. The additional profit large firms may earn as a consequence is a rent, funded by zero-sum losing consumers and weaker competitors.
The award of government contracts is often as much political as it is economic. Such a process is not subject to the market discipline imposed on private contracts, so there is ample opportunity for rents via cost-padding and graft, again funded by zero-sum losing taxpayers.
More generally, government purchases of any kind are subject to weak market discipline, like any buyer spending someone else’s money. Thus, government has a tendency to pay prices not supported by economic value, offering rents to suppliers, funded by zero-sum losing taxpayers.
The tax deduction afforded to employer-provided health care is a targeted subsidy that leads employees to over-insure. More fundamentally, these employees and their employers are zero-sum winners. It also creates profits for health insurers and drives up health care costs. The zero-sum spoils are to the detriment of other taxpayers and participants in the individual insurance market.
Drug prohibition drives up black market profits, creating zero-sum winnings at the expense and safety of users.
Social Security creates zero-sum winnings for those who will not or cannot save. But this is a mixed bag to the extent that some people are unable to save privately: their ability to do so is largely usurped via payroll taxes, both on them and on their employer. The many zero-sum losers would otherwise have no difficulty earning better returns on private investments.

There are many other examples. And almost everyone ends up on one side or the other of many different zero-sum outcomes. Show me a government action and I’ll show you zero-sum winners and losers. This is not to say there are no welfare gains associated with government action. Public aid, for example, is intended as social insurance and surely has some value in mitigating the risks of personal economic calamity. Nonetheless, the overextension and poor incentives of aid programs create a significant zero-sum component. Likewise, government spending on public goods creates social benefits, but government is insufficiently incented to economize, creating a zero-sum win for contractors and losses for taxpayers.

Not Zero Sum

While zero-sum winners collect economic rents, the existence of economic rents does not imply a zero-sum winning. For example, members of the so-called rentier class collect passive investment income. Those investments represent a supply of current resources to other parties hoping to transform them into a greater supply of future resources. That’s productive, and so the gains enjoyed by rentiers are not zero-sum winnings, but payments for the use of transformational capital.

Economic profits are those exceeding the owner’s opportunity cost, and they too are called rents. They should not necessarily be classified as zero-sum gains, however. Only sometimes. Successful innovators and first movers often earn economic profits as a reward for their efforts, as do alert entrepreneurs deploying their resources where they are most demanded. This “positive-sumness” applies to monopolists with a hot product just as surely as it applies to a firm facing nascent competition. But economic profits gained through political connections, outright graft, and government-enabled monopoly are zero-sum, enabled by non-market, authoritarian forces. Members of the political class tend to share in these zero-sum gains, and there are many losers.

Zero-Sum Psyche

Unfortunately, zero-sum thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche, despite our transition to a higher plane of social cooperation via markets. Even in those markets, certain outcomes might seem zero-sum in the moment. Witness the widespread denigration of the profit motive, which produces efficient outcomes in the long-run. As noted above, over time, the biggest winners tend to be those capable of creating the most value.

If you ask school children today how to get rich, many will say “win the lottery” without hesitation. I know, I know, government-sponsored lotteries are a relatively new phenomenon, and some of the lottery proceeds may benefit schools or other public programs, but the idea that a game of chance is so indelibly ingrained in the minds of children is a manifestation of the psychology of zero-sum success.

The Tangled Mess

So we have the zero-sum winners: successful gamblers, thieves, and rent seekers. The latter root deeply for gains made possible by government intervention in private affairs, actions that always leave room for enduring rents. They always lobby fiercely for new public interventions that might confer private advantages. And then we have the hapless public, stumbling through a series of zero-sum gains and losses made possible by the Leviathan they know and obey. They should look in the mirror, because every law and every program they have allowed their political leaders to hatch, reliably sold as good and just, creates more zero-sum activity to the detriment of long-term economic welfare. Roll it back!

Pruitt Out At EPA; So Is Eco-Absolutism

13 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by pnuetz in Environment, Regulation

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Andrew Wheeler, Clean Air Act, Clean Power Plan, Clean Water Act, Compliance Costs, Endangerment Finding, Environmental Justice, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, Ledyard King, Navigable Waters, Paris Climate Accord, Scott Pruitt, Social Cost of Carbon, Sue and Settle, Superfund, Transparent Science

Green munchkins celebrated the fall of a house of cronyism earlier this month when it crashed right on top of EPA chief Scott Pruitt. Not that the Environmental Protection Agency has ever been free of cronyism and wicked warlocks, but Pruitt stumbled into an awkward appearance of coziness with industry representatives and was seemingly too fond of his expense account. The munchkins, however, will be sorely disappointed to learn that Andrew Wheeler, Pruitt’s replacement on at least an interim basis, will press forward with the same deregulatory agenda. They might imagine Wheeler as the surviving Warlock of the West, but the munchkins are incapable of understanding the deeper nature of wickedness at the EPA.

The agency took an expansive role during the Obama Administration (see this note on “environmental justice”, and this on the use of the “social cost of carbon” in rulemaking, and this on water regulation). Aggressive action was directed at emissions of carbon, a trace greenhouse gas (four parts per 10,000), but one that is necessary for life. In 2009, the EPA reached its “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases, including carbon, pose a threat to humanity that must be addressed under the powers conferred upon the agency by the Clean Air Act. The Obama Administration viewed this finding as a regulatory carte blanche, ushering in a series of draconian, high-cost measures to reduce U.S. carbon emissions. Unfortunately, the environmental lobby is notorious for its inability to see beyond first-order effects. It cannot come to grips with the fact that green policies often waste more resources than they save, undermine the economy, infringe on liberty, and have their greatest negative impact on the poor.

President Obama also pushed for American participation in the Paris Climate Accord, which would have required transfers of billions of dollars of wealth to the often-corrupt governments of less developed countries for alternative energy projects. Beyond green energy objectives, this was presumably restitution for our past carbon sins. Whatever shortcomings Pruitt might have had, I valued his leadership in opposition to the Paris Accord and his role in dismantling the EPA’s overzealous regulatory model.

Pruitt might have earned praise from the green lobby in at least one area. He placed particular emphasis on streamlining Superfund site remediation, including a radioactive waste site in the St. Louis area. It is one of the so-called “top-10” sites that have been given high priority by the EPA. But there are 1,300 Superfund sites across the country, so Andrew Wheeler will have to be creative to succeed with more than just a few of these cleanups.

Ledyard King discusses the likely course of Scott Pruitt’s legacy under Wheeler, including continued opposition to the Paris Accord, reversing or deemphasizing renewable power mandates, reduced staffing and fewer enforcement actions. The Clean Power Plan is slated for replacement with rules that are not prohibitive to coal-fired power. Emissions from coal-burning are already heavily regulated, and CO2 and its unproven harms do not offer a valid pretext for a wholesale shutdown of the coal industry. Actions under the endangerment finding, if there are any, are likely to be more circumspect going forward. However, there are disconcerting reports that the Trump Administration may seek to subsidize or protect coal interests from more cost-effective alternatives, like natural gas.

According to King, Wheeler will continue Pruitt’s effort to balance representation on EPA advisory boards between academicians and business and state interests, include more geographic diversity on these boards, and end grant awards to members. Wheeler will continue to push for EPA rule-making based on fully-transparent science, rather than studies relying on private data. There are also likely to be efforts to stop “sue-and-settle” actions used by partisans to gain court-ordered consent decrees, which subvert public participation in the regulatory process.

The endangerment finding combined with the dubious and notoriously uncertain “social cost of carbon” gave EPA regulators almost unbridled power to control private activity. This ranged from questionable efficiency standards, uneconomic mandates on energy sources, and prohibitive emissions standards. The EPA also promulgated an expansive definition of “navigable waters” as an excuse to regulate virtually any puddle, or sometimes puddle, as wetland under the Clean Water Act. This overzealousness is a consequence of over-application of the precautionary principle, under which any prospective risk to humanity or the environment provides a rationale for regulation, taxation, or prohibition of an activity. It is also a consequence of refusing to recognize that government regulation, when it offers any benefit, has diminishing returns. The compliance costs of EPA regulations have been estimated to exceed $350 billion annually, a substantial impediment to economic growth that imposes cruel penalties on business, workers, and consumers. It is all the worse that these effects are strongly regressive in their impacts across income levels. Scott Pruitt may have been his own worst enemy, but his departure at this point might well advance the much-needed deregulatory agenda, as it is now that it is in the competent hands of Andrew Wheeler.

Administrative Cost Causers

20 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by pnuetz in monopoly

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Baumol's Disease, CATO Institute, Compliance Costs, Cost Disease, Health Care, Infrastructure Development, John Cochrane, Public education, Risk Mitigation, Ryan Bourne, Scott Alexander, Sir John Hicks, Slate Star Codex, Third-Party Payers

Certain enterprises seem plagued by declining productivity and increasing costs, or what is sometimes called the “cost disease”. This includes such areas as education, health care, and infrastructure development. Prompted by a fascinating post by Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex, John Cochrane boils things down to administrative bloat, sometimes caused by regulation. He also identifies a lack of competition as a cause of the bloat. To that I would add institutional arrangements like third-party payments that create gaps between the scheduled prices established by payers and the user’s willingness to pay. Ryan Bourne at the CATO Institute also comments on Alexander’s post; he presents a framework for analysis but demurs from weighing-in on the causes because the U.S. lacks a proper index of public sector output. He mentions Cochrane’s post, but essentially ignores his contribution to the discussion, which I believe is essential to understanding the phenomenon described by Alexander.

The facts are: 1) costs in K – 12 education have tripled since 1970 (but not the student population), while student achievement has remained flat; as a consequence, productivity in education has declined by two-thirds! Alexander notes, “College is even worse.” 2) The cost of health care has increased by 400% since 1970. While longevity has increased and treatments for many ills have improved, we have not enjoyed a 400% improvement in health care delivery and outcomes, and other developed countries achieve the same outcomes at much lower cost; 3) the cost of new infrastructure has increased drastically in the U.S. Alexander cites the cost of the new subway extension in New York City ($2.2 billion per kilometer) at a cost of about 10 – 50 times that of equivalent projects in other parts of the world. These are just a few examples.

What explains these rampant cost increases? Economists are often tempted to attribute such phenomena to “Baumol’s disease“, which holds that sectors in which productivity is relatively static will experience increasing costs due to advances in productivity in other sectors. A classic example is an orchestra. In the act of playing a particular piece of music, an orchestra today has about the same productivity as an orchestra of 200 years ago (though technology can make musicians more productive in other ways). But as productivity grows for workers in the rest of the economy, their real wages will increase. Musicians, and potential future musicians, will then face a steeper tradeoff in their decision to proceed with musical careers. This tendency will increase their reservation wages as musicians. Moreover, consumers achieving more affluence from their work in other sectors — higher real wages — may demand more concerts, and some of those benefits will flow to members of the orchestra.

Have the orchestra’s costs increased without any corresponding increase in real productivity? Well, that argument isn’t quite cinched, since the real wages of the orchestra members and the real revenue derived from their productivity have both increased. Nevertheless, Alexander presents data showing that the real pay of public school teachers, hospital workers, and most physicians (excepting some specialists) has been stagnant, so at least those crucial labor inputs do not account for the increasing costs. While the pay of construction workers has undoubtedly increased, it cannot plausibly account for the cost increases in infrastructure development. But here is Alexander:

“I don’t have a similar graph for subway workers, but come on. The overall pictures is that health care and education costs have managed to increase by ten times without a single cent of the gains going to teachers, doctors, or nurses.”

So what might explain the “cost disease” plaguing these sectors? Alexander discusses, and dismisses, several possible theories, and finally settles on a very partial cause: regulation. From personal experience, I can attest to the bizarre commitment of large pools of talent to regulatory compliance. And there is validity to the argument that this bloat is related to legal risks, which organizations attempt to mitigate by creating layers of controls. Cochrane agrees that the real answer is sometimes related to regulation, but the explanation is much broader:

“The ratio of teachers to students hasn’t gone down a lot — but the ratio of administrators to students has shot up. Most large public school systems spend more than half their budget on administrators. Similarly, class sizes at most colleges and universities haven’t changed that much — but administrative staff have exploded. There are 2.5 people handling insurance claims for every doctor. Construction sites have always had a lot of people standing around for every one actually working the machine. But now for every person operating the machine there is an army of planners, regulators, lawyers, administrative staff, consultants and so on.”

Cochrane shines a light on perhaps the most important reason for administrative bloat: an absence of competition:

“These are all areas either run by the government or with large government involvement. …with not much competition. In turn, however, they are not by a long shot ‘natural monopolies’ or failure of some free market. The main effect of our regulatory and legal system is not so much to directly raise costs, as it is to lessen competition (that is often its purpose). The lack of competition leads to the cost disease.

Though textbooks teach that monopoly leads to profits, it doesn’t. ‘The best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life’ said Hicks. Everywhere we see businesses protected from competition, especially highly regulated businesses, we see the cost disease spreading. And it spreads largely by forcing companies to hire loads of useless people.“

The quote of Sir John Hicks is particularly informative. Protection from competition means that profits are less risky. The protected monopolist’s profits might be limited by social contract, but they are subject to less business risk. Hicks’ observation suggests that monopolists are likely to take a more langourous approach to cost control.

There is another characteristic shared by public education, health care and infrastructure: not only do those enterprises face minimal, if any, competition, but there is a disconnection between the users of those services and the payers. The cost of public education to taxpayers often bears no relationship to their use of the system. The cost of health care is often borne by third-party payers, rather than patients. The users of public infrastructure are seldom asked to cover its costs. So while monopoly is worse than competition, third-party payments free users of the responsibility to make decisions at the margin, short-circuiting the role of consumer incentives in controlling costs. This could manifest in increasing marginal costs, but it is very likely to enable or even require administrative bloat to take place.

Free of competition, and with customers who do not face tradeoffs between usage and price, providers will manage both their services and costs based on rules established by third-parties, and worse, by multiple layers of payers (as when government subsidizes insurers, when employers offer insurance coverage, and when government subsidizes those employers for doing so). Third-party payers are sometimes lacking in information or direct control (e.g., taxpayers). Payers often face incentives that do not promote efficient delivery of services for which they are obligated to pay. The standards by which costs are justified are seldom subjected to a true market test.

If Cochrane is right, that cost disease is driven by administrative bloat, which in turn is often a consequence of regulation, a lack of competition, and third-party payments, then several general solutions suggest themselves: first, regulate lightly; second, promote competition; third, rely on direct, non-subsidized payments by users whenever possible. In education, these guidelines mean giving public schools more autonomy and allowing parental choice. For health care, they mean an end to mandates and regulatory burdens on insurers, employers and providers, allowing consumer choice in selecting health coverage, ending prohibitions on competition in the insurance marketplace, and eliminating tax subsidies. In infrastructure, the guidelines support streamlining the review process for infrastructure projects, avoiding subsidies to over-invest, relying more heavily on user fees to pay for infrastructure, and expanding the role of private developers and operators of infrastructure facilities.

Obama’s On-The-Clock Undertime Rule

23 Monday May 2016

Posted by pnuetz in Labor Markets, Regulation, Uncategorized

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AEIdeas, American Enterprise Institute, Andy Puzder, Business Formation, Compliance Costs, DOL Overtime Exemption, Flexible Work Arrangements, Hourly workers vs. Management, James Pethokoukis, John Cochrane, Nick Gillespie, Obama administration, Overtime Costs, Overtime rules, Private Compensation, Reason, Salaried Status, Warren Meyer

obama-unemployment-2

Hurting the ones you love: one of the Obama Administration’s calling cards is a penchant for misguided economic policy; the change in an overtime rule announced Wednesday by the Department of Labor (DOL) is a classic example. The DOL has amended the rule, which requires payments of time-and-a-half to workers who exceed 40 hours per week, by doubling the threshold at which salaried employees are exempt from overtime to $47,500 annually. This affects almost 5 million workers earning between the old threshold of $23,660 and the new threshold. While the media heralds Obama for “lifting the wages of millions of workers”, those with a grasp of economic reality know that it is a destructive policy.

The rule change is unambiguously bad for employers, many of which are small businesses. That should not be too difficult to understand. Most private employers operate in competitive markets and do not earn lavish profits at the expense of their employees. They need good employees, especially those in positions of responsibility, and they must pay them competitively. By imposing higher costs on these businesses, the rule puts them in a position of greater vulnerability in the marketplace. The higher costs also include extra record keeping to stay in compliance with the rule. The impact on new business formation is likely to be particularly damaging:

“We might be told that the answer for a startup is simply to ‘go and raise more money.’ But — aside from diluting the founders who are paying for the company with their sweat in exchange for the hope of a payoff that comes in years, if ever — raising capital is the single most difficult thing I do as a startup entrepreneur. I would invite anyone not in our field to give it a shot before he endorses a regulation that will impose greater capital costs on us.

Regulators often act as though they cannot imagine a world where a few hundred or a few thousand dollars can make the difference between success and failure. If you raise our costs even modestly, you will put some of us out of business.“

Shutting down, or not starting up, is a bad outcome, but that will be a consequence in some cases. However, there are other margins along which employers might respond. First, a lucky few well-placed managers might be rewarded with a small salary bump to lift them above the new exemption threshold. More likely, employers will reduce the base salaries of employees to accommodate the added overtime costs, leaving total compensation roughly unchanged.

Many other salaried employees with pay falling between the old and new thresholds are likely to lose their salaried status. Their new hourly wage might be discounted to allow them to work the hours to which they’re accustomed, as demotivating as that sounds. If their employers limit their hours, it is possible that a few extra workers could be hired to fill the gap. Perhaps that is what the administration hopes when it claims that an objective of the new rule is to create jobs. Unfortunately, those few lucky hires will owe their jobs to the forced sacrifice of hours by existing employees.

A change from a salary to hourly pay will have other repercussions for employees. Their relationships to their employers will be fundamentally transformed. Ambitious “hourly” managers might not have the opportunity to work extra hours in order to demonstrate their commitment to the business and a job well done. When the rule change was first proposed last June, I paraphrased a businessman who is one of my favorite bloggers, Warren Meyer (also see Meyer’s follow-ups here and here):

“As [Meyer] tells it, the change will convert ambitious young managers into clock-punchers. In case that sounds too much like a negative personality change, a more sympathetic view is that many workers do not mind putting in extra hours, even as it reduces their effective wage. They have their reasons, ranging from the non-pecuniary, such as simple work ethic, enjoyment and pride in their contribution to reward-driven competitiveness and ambition.“

As hourly employees, these workers might have to kiss goodbye to bonus payments, certain benefits, and flexible work arrangements, not to mention prestige. The following quotes are from a gated Wall Street Journal article but are quoted by James Pethokoukis in his piece at the AEIdeas blog of the American Enterprise Institute:

“Jason Parker, co-founder of K-9 Resorts, a franchiser of luxury dog hotels based in Fanwood, N.J., said the chain will reduce starting pay for newly hired assistant managers to about $35,000 from the $40,000 it pays now. That will absorb the overtime pay he expects he would have to give them, he said. …

Terry Shea, co-owner of two Wrapsody gift shops in Alabama, would prefer to keep her store managers exempt from the overtime-pay requirement as they are now. But raising their salaries above the new threshold to ensure that would be too big of a jump for those jobs in her region, she said. Instead, she’ll convert the managers to hourly employees and try to limit their weekly hours to as close to 40 as possible. She’ll also have to stop giving them a comp day when their weekly hours exceed 46, a benefit she said they like as working moms.

‘I will be demoted,’ said one of her store managers Bridget Veazey, who views the hourly classification as a step backward. ‘Being salaried means I have the flexibility to work the way I want,’ including staying an extra 30 minutes to perfect a window display or taking work home, she said. She is particularly concerned Ms. Shea might stop taking the managers on out-of-town trips to buy goods from retail markets, an experience she said would help her résumé but includes long days.“

Here is some other reading on the rule change: Nick Gillespie in Reason agrees that it’s a bad idea. Andy Puzder in Forbes weighs in on the negative consequences for workers. John Cochrane explores the simple economic implications of mandated wage increases, of which the overtime rule is an example. As he shows, only when the demand for labor hours is perfectly insensitive to wages can a mandated wage avoid reducing labor input.

This is another classic example of progressive good intentions gone awry. Government is singularly incapable of managing the private economy to good effect via rules and regulations. Private businesses hire employees to meet their needs in serving customers. The private compensation arrangements they make are mutually beneficial to businesses and their employees and are able to accommodate a variety of unique employee life-circumstances. Good employees are rewarded with additional compensation and more responsibility. By and large, salaried workers like being salaried! Hard work pays off, but the Obama Administration seems to view that simple, market truism as a defect. Please, don’t try to help too much!

The Insane Substitution Of Regulation For Value

21 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by pnuetz in Big Government, Regulation

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Broadband Investment, Code of Federal Regulation, Compliance Costs, Coyote Blog, Dodd Frank Act, e-Verify, Great Stagnation, Jimmy Carter, L. Gordon Crovitz, Mercatus Center, Net Neutrality, Obamacare penalties, Regulatory Burdens, Regulatory State, Vestigial Regulations, Warren Meyer

My day-job at a financial institution has become increasingly dominated by governance and compliance issues, due largely to the Dodd-Frank Act. Much less of my time these days is dedicated to activities that are of direct value to the business or its customers. It’s not just me, but a large number of talented professionals with whom I work, many having advanced degrees. And a platoon of government regulators with advanced degrees often resides in a conference room on our floor. As I overheard one colleague say the other day, even a sneeze now requires permission from regulators. It feels very much like working for a regulated public utility, or worse yet, a government agency. This is obviously costly for shareholders, customers and taxpayers. If asked, I would be hard-pressed to explain how such massive compliance activity adds value for anyone, except perhaps the regulators themselves, or those who like the job guarantee provided by the situation. Does it offer some extra guarantee of stability for our institution, which remained stable and viable throughout the last financial crisis? Not likely, especially if actually managing the business has anything to do with it. Does it guarantee the stability of the larger financial system to impose massive compliance costs and ossify an otherwise dynamic enterprise?

The financial industry is not the only sector plagued by this phenomenon. At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer provides a great perspective based on his own experience (and he deserves the inspirational hat-tip for this post). Meyer owns and operates a company that manages public parks. Here is his summary:

“Ten years ago, most of my company’s free capacity was used to pursue growth opportunities and refine operations. Over the last four years or so, all of our free capacity has been spent solely on compliance.“

Meyer offers details of compliance issues that have robbed his business of productive time and energy:

Managing hours of seasonal employees to avoid Obamacare penalties;
Seeking government approval of price increases to recover minimum wage hikes;
Implementing and running e-Verify on new hires;
Additional employee hiring documentation requirements;
Compliance with California regulation of chairs, hot-day practices, meal breaks, overtime assignments, employee sick days, and other processes;

He goes on to note some economy-wide implications of these entanglements:

“… for folks who are scratching their head over recent plateauing of productivity gains and reduced small business origination numbers, you might look in this direction.

By the way, it strikes me that regulatory compliance issues set a minimum size for business viability. You have to be large enough to cover those compliance issues and still make money. What I see happening is that as new compliance issues are layered on, that minimum size rises, like a rising tide slowly drowning companies not large enough to keep their head above water.“

There is no doubt that heavy regulation favors large firms over small firms, and it makes competing with entrenched businesses more difficult for new entrants. Here is the first of a trio of relevant posts from the Mercatus Center, a summary of research finding that regulation reduces new business start-ups and hiring activity.

A heavily regulated economy is likely to suffer from an accumulation of old, irrelevant, or often conflicting rules. A second Mercatus Center post, “‘Regulatory Appendicitis’ and the Dangers of Vestigial Regulations” focuses on an additional problem: the application of old rules to regulate new technologies:

“From a regulatory agency’s perspective, recycling old rules makes sense: Old rules have withstood legal challenges and offer a relatively safe legal route. However, the rules are unlikely to optimally fit the new context for which they are employed. The use of rules that aren’t optimized for the task at hand can significantly hamper innovation and the development of technology. Even worse, due to poor design, they may not actually accomplish the new objective.“

A case in point is the recent imposition of “net neutrality” rules, which prevent ISPs and internet backbone providers from charging incremental rates to network hogs. This involves the application of regulatory rules designed for railroads 130 years ago and applied to the phone system 80 years ago. L. Gordon Crovitz writes of the early, negative impact of this regulation on investment in broadband in a piece entitled “Obamanet Is Hurting Broadband” (if the link fails, Google “wsj Crovitz Obamanet Broadband” and choose the first link returned):

“Today bureaucrats lobbied by special interests determine what is ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’ on the Internet, including rates, tariffs and business arrangements. The FCC got thousands of requests for new regulations within weeks of the new rules. … Before Obamanet went into effect, economist Hal Singer of the Progressive Policy Institute predicted in The Wall Street Journal that if price and other regulations were introduced, capital investments by ISPs could quickly fall … 5% and 12% a year …. Now Mr. Singer has analyzed the latest data, and his prediction has come true.“

Crovitz correctly states that consumers want more broadband, and broadband growth requires investment. Systematically punishing those who make such investments will not bring improvements in service. And this is not an isolated result. Apart from the absorption of staff time (which is often required to manage new investment), regulation discourages productive capital investment in new facilities, equipment and technology. The potential growth of the economy suffers as a result, including the potential growth of wages.

Several past posts on Sacred Cow Chips have dealt with the heavy costs imposed by regulation, including “Life’s Bleak When Your Goal Is Compliance“, “You Probably Broke The Law Today“, and “There Oughtta NOT Be a Law“.

Is there really a trend toward greater regulation? Yes, and it is not new. Has it accelerated? A third Mercatus Center post demonstrates that the Obama Administration, in terms of new regulatory restrictions, is on a pace to exceed all preceding presidents over the past 40 years. This is based on the Code of Federal Regulation (though Jimmy Carter edged Obama slightly over Obama’s first four years). Obama’s penchant for executive orders shows no sign of abating, and Congress is apparently incapable of over-riding any veto. Much of this can be reversed, in principle, but new regulations have a way of creating political constituencies, so reversals might be easier to say than do.

Labeling Exemptions Subvert Law’s Phobic Intent

26 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by pnuetz in Uncategorized

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AAAS, Colorado, Commerce Clause, Compliance Costs, Denver Post, Farmer's Daughter, GMO food, GMO labeling law, Oregon, Oregonian, sworn statement, Unintended Consequences, Vermont

Predictably, Vermont’s new GMO labeling law is proving to be another classic failure of big government, as noted by The Farmer’s Daughter. Her post provides some of the gory details, including specific exceptions written into the drafted rules and “sworn statement” exemptions, both of which mean it will be of much less value to the public as a informational mechanism.

“The statement requires the signer to swear the food was not made from genetically engineered seeds and it was not co-mingled with any other GMO food. As you can imagine, such a system creates an odd set of regulations. On the one hand, a farmer has to keep all the GMO and GMO-free food separate, fill out these statements for each product, hope that nothing got mixed up, and risk perjury if it did. Alternatively, the grocery store has to keep the food separate, keep track of which sworn statement goes with which product (will they keep them in the display?), and hope that customers don’t mix up the products in the display.”

Obviously, the law will impose substantial compliance costs on farmers and grocers, and it will create barriers to trade across Vermont’s state lines that might ultimately meet a challenge under the Commerce Clause.

Meanwhile, debates over GMO labeling rage in a few other states, such as Oregon and Colorado, with measures on their ballots this November. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (publisher of Science magazine) is opposed to the Oregon’s initiative, as is the Oregonian newspaper, which published this editorial:

“Choice, in fact, is one reason to support the status quo, which provides organic and voluntarily labeled non-GE products for anyone who cares to buy them, usually at a higher price. The poor are protected, meanwhile, because, as the Washington report notes, ‘Volunteer labeling concentrates the costs on the target group able and willing to pay more for GMO-free products’ while ‘mandatory labeling imposes costs on everyone and not just those that desire GMO-free goods.’”

Here’s the Denver Post’s opinion on the Colorado measure:

“Colorado’s sugar beet growers could be seriously undermined. They grow genetically modified beets, so sugar from them would have GMO labels. Yet the beet growers argue that the end product is indistinguishable from other sugar because the GMO protein in the beets is removed in processing.

The same is true of vegetable oils from corn or canola seed that come from GMO plants.“

Life’s Bleak When Your Goal Is Compliance

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by pnuetz in Uncategorized

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Administrative State, Asset Forfeiture, Banana Republic, Compliance Costs, DOE, FDA, Fines and Taxes, Michael Greve, Regulatory State, Richard Rahn

Don’t underestimate the danger and cost of giving it up to the regulatory state. It’s ability to impel behavior in the absence of any legislative mandate, and apparently without accountability to the judicial branch or any other authority, is explored by Michael Greve in “Prescription for a Banana Republic.” He does this mostly in the context of the Department of Education, but he also mentions the FDA’s practice of issuing “draft” guidance, frequently with perverse consequences. I know from my own experience in the financial industry that the problem is more general. Here’s one snippet from Greve’s article:

“Why do we permit agencies to proceed in this underhanded, unreviewable fashion? The general idea is that in choosing to proceed by “guidance” rather than formal, reviewable regulation, the agency is giving something up: the legally binding effect of its rulings. It’s not really coercing anybody, and so why bother the courts? That answer, however, wildly underestimates government’s ingenuity in giving real-world effect to supposedly informal documents.”

Richard Rahn had a piece yesterday on the closely related topic of fines and asset forfeitures imposed by regulators without any court proceeding, let alone a conviction. He quotes two former directors of the DOJ’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Office:

“Civil asset forfeiture and money-laundering laws are gross perversions of the status of government amid a free citizenry. The individual is the font of sovereignty in our constitutional republic, and it is unacceptable that a citizen should have to ‘prove’ anything to the government. If the government has probable cause of a violation of law, then let a warrant be issued. And if the government has proof beyond a reasonable doubt of guilt, let that guilt be proclaimed by 12 peers.”

Greve mentions the strong influence exerted by regulators issuing so-called “Dear Colleague” letters containing “suggested” steps that might be taken “voluntarily” to avoid falling out of compliance with often ill-defined requirements:

“Whereupon compliance officers across the country can be heard clearing their throats: I can help…. Replicate the m.o. across the full range of government services and regulation: it takes a ton of money to escape. Once you start adopting Juan Peron’s legal model, social patterns will follow. We’re well on our way.”

Nudge me when it’s over. Oh, wait!