Paying attention to the politician behind the curtain
In response to a post Kos put up on the Cato blog, many writers pointed out that the corporations he fears are mostly that large because of, not in spite of, government. What none or few have stated is how government has aided and abetted corporations. The answer is that they have given both legal and financial aid, especially by spreading risk and cost in transportation, communication, and energy, but also in other areas.
How has the state (or states) done so? And how do these influence the size and scope of industry?
1) Legal:
a) Incorporation, protection from liability. Tempting to say that this would shield owners from lawsuits, but it is at least a little likely that the system has created entities that are large enough to draw lawyers. In other words, the size of corporations invites lawyers; if they were smaller, the legal profession would not have started using industry as a pinata*, and that part of the legal system would not have grown as large as it has.
b) Rights of way. In my experience, there are Democrats particularly and a few nondenominational real-estate-agent-slash-city-commissioners that think that this is one of the most useful aspects of government because it addresses the market failure of The Holdout Problem. The holdout interferes with the efficient operation of railroads and highways, the former being a favorite of the post-industrial left and the latter being a subject of dispute that involved David Friedman and Steve Kangas, in which David questioned whether the problem was as serious as it was claimed.
This is interesting, since the industrial left saw Railroad Tycoons as evil embodied. They moved on to embrace the Good Roads Movement as the antidote. Now, they condemn the roads and want more light rail transport, showing how conservative the Left has become. It is only the libertarians adopting the radical position of wanting to turn roads into pay-per-use roads (public/private is almost inconsequential). It is the Left now advocating eminent domain to take over houses for shopping malls. Governor Bill Richardson, D-NM, is involved in both of these issues: advocating light rail and vetoing anti-Kelo legislation.
In the most egregious cases, states and the federal government granted not just rights of way to land which still had to be paid for, but land titles free and clear. That is more of a financial than a legal aid, and is covered below.
c) Regulatory cover. This is the primary reason for which railroads decided to bring the federal government into play in their domain. The states wanted to enforce a myriad of local rules, so railroads wanted the federal government to come in and trump those rules. Complying with one set of rules is cheaper than many, giving an advantage to a few larger rail systems than many small ones. Furthermore, once someone is compliant with federal law, it becomes more difficult to claim that they should have done something differently. Further, a single regulatory board is easier to capture than multiple boards. And once an oversite agency is captured, it is easier to pass laws that restrict competition. This is not a clear-cut issue: many of the states' laws existed to promote the interests of local political entrepreneurs. As I recall, Cincinatti had something like 14 railroads coming into it, but they were not allowed to tie together or exchange freight cars, so everything (freight and passengers) had to be unloaded, carted, and reloaded to the great delight of hoteliers, teamsters, and porters.
d) Patents - I'm ambivalent about this, but thought I should include it to be thorough. Yes, granting patents is a government support for certain industries, especially the early communications industry (AT&T). However, at the time the patents started to fall, the communications industry started to take off like gangbusters (see, for example, this white paper).
e) Charter for lottery: This is not exactly something that would come up as a problem in a libertarian or anarchist environment. You want to run a lottery, go ahead. But this is something I've come across in early railroad histories.
2) Financial
a) Land grants (railroads) - As promised above, the state and federal governments granted land to railroads outright. With the transcontinental railroads, the land was granted in a checkerboard pattern, and the rails sold some of theirs to finance the building of the road. Other railroads may have received outright grants of the whole line (I'm thinking here of the Erie and other canals which may have been granted land outright, but I could be wrong). The exception is the Great Northern, but even they started out with a state land grant to the St. Paul and Pacific, which failed before Hill acquired it.
b) Other financing - The Union Pacific was given government loans which they had to pay back. This is what most people think of when they think about subsidies to Rails in the 19th century. The government loaned money to the Union Pacific, leading to all kinds of shenanigans, such as building pointless spurs to increase mileage (they were financed by mile built), and kickback schemes that led to the Credit Mobilier scandal. Of course, it's entirely possible that this was as harmful as useful to the actual operation of the rails. The Great Northern was the most financially stable of all of them, owing to the fact that it built up the railroad's customer base as it went. The Union Pacific was said to be like an apple tree without branches, though that overlooks the useless branches.
c) Tax and other breaks? - I'm not sure what example would be most appropriate here, though I believe there may have been some related to the creation of the early rail and communications networks. Perhaps not -- the federal government was much smaller and was funded differently back then. Modern examples might include the breaks given to SUV owners, especially in Arizona for alternative fuel-powered vehicles, or those given to hybrid owners and thus securing a greater market share for those technologies instead of diesel (which are capable of burning biomass fuels). My turbodiesel gets the same gas mileage as a Prius (49 mpg last tank), yet they get a break and I don't, which is just a microcosmic example of how government policy picks winners.
d) Infrastructure: Roads - Roads are provided without charge at the point of use, giving the automobile industry a competitive advantage over rail. Surprisingly, most roads prior to the railroad era were toll roads, many of which were private (see for example, Ben Klein's list of online papers, especially Private Roads: Learning from the 19th Century, and Gabriel Roth, Roads in a Market Economy). After the rail era, the Good Roads movement and then the car companies themselves went on to advocate government spending on road infrastructure at the expense of other modes. There was even a myth that GM had bought up the electric tram companies in order to force them to use GM's buses (related in Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale), but this is disputed.
e) Infrastructure: Armed forces - The Great Northern didn't receive funding or land from the federal government, but they did receive some protection from or bargaining power with Indians when going through one of the reservations (the Nez Perce, IIRC). The shipping industry received substantial aid from the Navy as early as Jefferson's war on the Barbary pirates (1805, though not a resounding success: at that time we still free-rode on Great Britain the way the rest of the world does on us at present). And of course the oil industry receives some benefit (though it's not as substantial as the Left thinks it is) from the Army. Without the US Army, settlers would have had to negotiate their way across the west, and it is doubtful whether things would have turned out quite the same way.
f) Risk - The corporation was essentially a form of risk relief for business owners. Without it, they might still have purchased insurance. Incorporation is a less expensive way of building a large company. However, Carnegie and Rockefeller both built rather large concerns without incorporation (a limited liability partnership and a trust).
Discussion
The transport sector benefits from those in a multitude of ways. The Navy protects shipping and the Army protected the transcontinental railroads and the telegraph lines (though both were also known to use private security, also). The owners were able to take on risky ventures by sharing the risk with bond holders, stock holders, employees, passengers, freight shippers through incorporation, and with citizens generally through regulation, infrastructure, eminent domain, and so on. The federal government made grade crossings a problem of roads rather than the railroads, and then built the automobile roads securing the spreading of risk among citizens. The transcontinentals were the recipients of federal land grants and bonds (except for the Great Northern), while all railroads were probably recipients of state land grants and maybe a few state bond issues. There were certainly cases where local, state, and federal governments have exercised their right of eminent domain for the rails and later for cars.
The communication sector benefited from patent protection and then from right-of-way grants. AT&T was shielded from competition from 1914 to 1984, 70 years during which they had no competitors and were encouraged to build out a large system. The modern system benefited (very little) from DoD (DARPA) investment into the original Internet, which still rides on some of the original AT&T-era infrastructure (MCI was permitted to build out a long haul long distance system that became the backbone of a large share of the Internet traffic).
The energy sector, as I have been arguing (see my comments on the Environmental Economics blog and here), has also benefited from similar support. Like AT&T's Vail, early electricity entrepreneur Samuel Insull agreed to accept government oversight in exchange for protection from competitors. Undoubtedly, the incorporation helped them to grow as public stock companies, and most cities as well as other levels of government will invoke eminent domain in order to run utility lines according to the desires of the electric power companies. Electric utility companies benefit the most from the regulatory cover afforded to their pollution, being the main contributor to CO2, SO2, and Hg pollution. They undoubtedly have received a number of tax grants. REA enforced the idea that rural areas should be powered by AC grids, not local sources (e.g. the windmills that used to dominate the pre-FDR landscape). Today, the system is huge, vulnerable (to terrorists as well as natural and system failure disasters), and inefficient. AC was technically superior to DC for transmission, but not necessarily for local use. Even still, some 67% of electricity is wasted as heat at the plant or in transmission and distribution, which makes me wonder about possible diseconomies of scale in that industry.
Counterargument
Given that all of these are true, one question with two parts remains: How important were these effects really? The first part is, how much did the federal and state aid really come to in terms of percentage of private actions and finance? The second part is, how much of an effect did that have relative to how things might have been without it? If it is not clear to what extent the government contributed to the rise of the transportation and communication companies, it is even harder to determine to what extent they in turn led to the rise of subsequent industry. To what extent were they relying on rails, for example? Singer and Ford built tidewater factories and used ships and barges. Perhaps that is implicitly included in the argument because government aided water shipping in one form or another?
Even if I concede for the sake of argument that the transcontinentals were entirely paid for by the US government, does that mean that industry would not have risen to the size it has today? I see very little contribution to the Industrial Revolution coming out of California. I furthermore doubt whether the California consumer market was that large, which was an argument against funding the transcontinentals in the first place (the real reason for funding them was not economic, but political: keep California on the side of the Union). So even if they hadn't been built, I suspect that many things would have gone as they did. In fact, the country remained quite regional at least until the WWI era, so there is reason to doubt the government financing had that much effect. Most industry was located in the Northeast, and things remained that way until just within the past 70 years, so I find some doubt as to whether the transcontinental railroads built in the 1860s, 140 years ago, had that much effect.
McCormick moved his works from Virginia to Chicago almost 16 years after first demonstrating the "Virginia Reaper". How much did they benefit from the train and telegraph? I'd say not much. since he was obviously moving closer to his market. Perhaps they would have grown regional building facilities rather than national facilities, but the business would have grown with or without the railroad and the telegraph since it was a product that could be horse-drawn by design. The same is true of other industries, such as the automobile: there were many manufacturers before consolidation of Chevrolet and then GM, and even after. Perhaps they would have stayed regional until later, but is it possible that they still would have consolidated? What about the bicycle, a favorite of the neo-luddite movement -- why is the bicycle not included with the other predecessors of The Modern? It was built regionally, and served as a forerunner to the automobile – how did the railroads permit the rise of the bicycle, and then lead to the consolidation (if there has been one)? Not only did bicycle manufacture introduce metal stamping, but it gave people the idea that a personal transport was both feasible and desirable. Indeed, Ford's first vehicle was a quadricycle.
I think we tend to overstate the impact that certain industries had because we are judging from our perspective rather than the perspective of those times. Horses didn't disappear the moment the railroads appeared, and railroads didn't disappear the moment the automobile arrived. Although many railroads were started in the 1840s for the purpose of getting coal from the Appalachian hills to urban centers, the railroads themselves didn't switch to coal from wood until the last quarter of the 19th century. People used to write letters even after the telegraph. It has only been in the past 20 years (perhaps the last 10 or even 5) that instant ordering from stock has been adopted in the retail business, so how much benefit were we getting even from the phone? At one time, consolidation in the rail, then the steel, and then the oil industry had the country in an uproar. Today, those are minor industries.
Without incorporation, a cottage industry in personal liability insurance may have permitted similar advances. However, the costs would have been more internalized with the private insurance. Such insurance actually exists today: personal liability for doctors, nurses, and other professionals. I think stories about these costs driving doctors out of practice because of lawsuits should be discounted: the other possibility is that they are driven by interest costs (when rates fall, the insurance companies raise prices to keep profits steady) or by doctors trying to make a case for political action on their behalf. And here again, why is the insurance industry so consolidated (is it?)? Is it because of laws or economies of scale?
Kevin Carson offers a broad perspective of the traditional view of bigness here in the form of a draft chapter of a new book.
As to whether Democratic or Republican administrations abet corporations more -- as massive not passive argues (via the Mutualist blog) -- that's a puerile debate. For one thing, as I've repeatedly tried to get people to understand, the president only controls 1/3 of the mechanisms of the government. For another, Gabriel Kolko should be required reading for people interested in this kind of thing. Nevertheless,
* How the devil do you put in non-English characters so they can be read by other browsers? Neither Word nor Writely seem to use generally accepted letters.
How has the state (or states) done so? And how do these influence the size and scope of industry?
1) Legal:
a) Incorporation, protection from liability. Tempting to say that this would shield owners from lawsuits, but it is at least a little likely that the system has created entities that are large enough to draw lawyers. In other words, the size of corporations invites lawyers; if they were smaller, the legal profession would not have started using industry as a pinata*, and that part of the legal system would not have grown as large as it has.
b) Rights of way. In my experience, there are Democrats particularly and a few nondenominational real-estate-agent-slash-city-commissioners that think that this is one of the most useful aspects of government because it addresses the market failure of The Holdout Problem. The holdout interferes with the efficient operation of railroads and highways, the former being a favorite of the post-industrial left and the latter being a subject of dispute that involved David Friedman and Steve Kangas, in which David questioned whether the problem was as serious as it was claimed.
This is interesting, since the industrial left saw Railroad Tycoons as evil embodied. They moved on to embrace the Good Roads Movement as the antidote. Now, they condemn the roads and want more light rail transport, showing how conservative the Left has become. It is only the libertarians adopting the radical position of wanting to turn roads into pay-per-use roads (public/private is almost inconsequential). It is the Left now advocating eminent domain to take over houses for shopping malls. Governor Bill Richardson, D-NM, is involved in both of these issues: advocating light rail and vetoing anti-Kelo legislation.
In the most egregious cases, states and the federal government granted not just rights of way to land which still had to be paid for, but land titles free and clear. That is more of a financial than a legal aid, and is covered below.
c) Regulatory cover. This is the primary reason for which railroads decided to bring the federal government into play in their domain. The states wanted to enforce a myriad of local rules, so railroads wanted the federal government to come in and trump those rules. Complying with one set of rules is cheaper than many, giving an advantage to a few larger rail systems than many small ones. Furthermore, once someone is compliant with federal law, it becomes more difficult to claim that they should have done something differently. Further, a single regulatory board is easier to capture than multiple boards. And once an oversite agency is captured, it is easier to pass laws that restrict competition. This is not a clear-cut issue: many of the states' laws existed to promote the interests of local political entrepreneurs. As I recall, Cincinatti had something like 14 railroads coming into it, but they were not allowed to tie together or exchange freight cars, so everything (freight and passengers) had to be unloaded, carted, and reloaded to the great delight of hoteliers, teamsters, and porters.
d) Patents - I'm ambivalent about this, but thought I should include it to be thorough. Yes, granting patents is a government support for certain industries, especially the early communications industry (AT&T). However, at the time the patents started to fall, the communications industry started to take off like gangbusters (see, for example, this white paper).
e) Charter for lottery: This is not exactly something that would come up as a problem in a libertarian or anarchist environment. You want to run a lottery, go ahead. But this is something I've come across in early railroad histories.
2) Financial
a) Land grants (railroads) - As promised above, the state and federal governments granted land to railroads outright. With the transcontinental railroads, the land was granted in a checkerboard pattern, and the rails sold some of theirs to finance the building of the road. Other railroads may have received outright grants of the whole line (I'm thinking here of the Erie and other canals which may have been granted land outright, but I could be wrong). The exception is the Great Northern, but even they started out with a state land grant to the St. Paul and Pacific, which failed before Hill acquired it.
b) Other financing - The Union Pacific was given government loans which they had to pay back. This is what most people think of when they think about subsidies to Rails in the 19th century. The government loaned money to the Union Pacific, leading to all kinds of shenanigans, such as building pointless spurs to increase mileage (they were financed by mile built), and kickback schemes that led to the Credit Mobilier scandal. Of course, it's entirely possible that this was as harmful as useful to the actual operation of the rails. The Great Northern was the most financially stable of all of them, owing to the fact that it built up the railroad's customer base as it went. The Union Pacific was said to be like an apple tree without branches, though that overlooks the useless branches.
c) Tax and other breaks? - I'm not sure what example would be most appropriate here, though I believe there may have been some related to the creation of the early rail and communications networks. Perhaps not -- the federal government was much smaller and was funded differently back then. Modern examples might include the breaks given to SUV owners, especially in Arizona for alternative fuel-powered vehicles, or those given to hybrid owners and thus securing a greater market share for those technologies instead of diesel (which are capable of burning biomass fuels). My turbodiesel gets the same gas mileage as a Prius (49 mpg last tank), yet they get a break and I don't, which is just a microcosmic example of how government policy picks winners.
d) Infrastructure: Roads - Roads are provided without charge at the point of use, giving the automobile industry a competitive advantage over rail. Surprisingly, most roads prior to the railroad era were toll roads, many of which were private (see for example, Ben Klein's list of online papers, especially Private Roads: Learning from the 19th Century, and Gabriel Roth, Roads in a Market Economy). After the rail era, the Good Roads movement and then the car companies themselves went on to advocate government spending on road infrastructure at the expense of other modes. There was even a myth that GM had bought up the electric tram companies in order to force them to use GM's buses (related in Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale), but this is disputed.
e) Infrastructure: Armed forces - The Great Northern didn't receive funding or land from the federal government, but they did receive some protection from or bargaining power with Indians when going through one of the reservations (the Nez Perce, IIRC). The shipping industry received substantial aid from the Navy as early as Jefferson's war on the Barbary pirates (1805, though not a resounding success: at that time we still free-rode on Great Britain the way the rest of the world does on us at present). And of course the oil industry receives some benefit (though it's not as substantial as the Left thinks it is) from the Army. Without the US Army, settlers would have had to negotiate their way across the west, and it is doubtful whether things would have turned out quite the same way.
f) Risk - The corporation was essentially a form of risk relief for business owners. Without it, they might still have purchased insurance. Incorporation is a less expensive way of building a large company. However, Carnegie and Rockefeller both built rather large concerns without incorporation (a limited liability partnership and a trust).
Discussion
The transport sector benefits from those in a multitude of ways. The Navy protects shipping and the Army protected the transcontinental railroads and the telegraph lines (though both were also known to use private security, also). The owners were able to take on risky ventures by sharing the risk with bond holders, stock holders, employees, passengers, freight shippers through incorporation, and with citizens generally through regulation, infrastructure, eminent domain, and so on. The federal government made grade crossings a problem of roads rather than the railroads, and then built the automobile roads securing the spreading of risk among citizens. The transcontinentals were the recipients of federal land grants and bonds (except for the Great Northern), while all railroads were probably recipients of state land grants and maybe a few state bond issues. There were certainly cases where local, state, and federal governments have exercised their right of eminent domain for the rails and later for cars.
The communication sector benefited from patent protection and then from right-of-way grants. AT&T was shielded from competition from 1914 to 1984, 70 years during which they had no competitors and were encouraged to build out a large system. The modern system benefited (very little) from DoD (DARPA) investment into the original Internet, which still rides on some of the original AT&T-era infrastructure (MCI was permitted to build out a long haul long distance system that became the backbone of a large share of the Internet traffic).
The energy sector, as I have been arguing (see my comments on the Environmental Economics blog and here), has also benefited from similar support. Like AT&T's Vail, early electricity entrepreneur Samuel Insull agreed to accept government oversight in exchange for protection from competitors. Undoubtedly, the incorporation helped them to grow as public stock companies, and most cities as well as other levels of government will invoke eminent domain in order to run utility lines according to the desires of the electric power companies. Electric utility companies benefit the most from the regulatory cover afforded to their pollution, being the main contributor to CO2, SO2, and Hg pollution. They undoubtedly have received a number of tax grants. REA enforced the idea that rural areas should be powered by AC grids, not local sources (e.g. the windmills that used to dominate the pre-FDR landscape). Today, the system is huge, vulnerable (to terrorists as well as natural and system failure disasters), and inefficient. AC was technically superior to DC for transmission, but not necessarily for local use. Even still, some 67% of electricity is wasted as heat at the plant or in transmission and distribution, which makes me wonder about possible diseconomies of scale in that industry.
Counterargument
Given that all of these are true, one question with two parts remains: How important were these effects really? The first part is, how much did the federal and state aid really come to in terms of percentage of private actions and finance? The second part is, how much of an effect did that have relative to how things might have been without it? If it is not clear to what extent the government contributed to the rise of the transportation and communication companies, it is even harder to determine to what extent they in turn led to the rise of subsequent industry. To what extent were they relying on rails, for example? Singer and Ford built tidewater factories and used ships and barges. Perhaps that is implicitly included in the argument because government aided water shipping in one form or another?
Even if I concede for the sake of argument that the transcontinentals were entirely paid for by the US government, does that mean that industry would not have risen to the size it has today? I see very little contribution to the Industrial Revolution coming out of California. I furthermore doubt whether the California consumer market was that large, which was an argument against funding the transcontinentals in the first place (the real reason for funding them was not economic, but political: keep California on the side of the Union). So even if they hadn't been built, I suspect that many things would have gone as they did. In fact, the country remained quite regional at least until the WWI era, so there is reason to doubt the government financing had that much effect. Most industry was located in the Northeast, and things remained that way until just within the past 70 years, so I find some doubt as to whether the transcontinental railroads built in the 1860s, 140 years ago, had that much effect.
McCormick moved his works from Virginia to Chicago almost 16 years after first demonstrating the "Virginia Reaper". How much did they benefit from the train and telegraph? I'd say not much. since he was obviously moving closer to his market. Perhaps they would have grown regional building facilities rather than national facilities, but the business would have grown with or without the railroad and the telegraph since it was a product that could be horse-drawn by design. The same is true of other industries, such as the automobile: there were many manufacturers before consolidation of Chevrolet and then GM, and even after. Perhaps they would have stayed regional until later, but is it possible that they still would have consolidated? What about the bicycle, a favorite of the neo-luddite movement -- why is the bicycle not included with the other predecessors of The Modern? It was built regionally, and served as a forerunner to the automobile – how did the railroads permit the rise of the bicycle, and then lead to the consolidation (if there has been one)? Not only did bicycle manufacture introduce metal stamping, but it gave people the idea that a personal transport was both feasible and desirable. Indeed, Ford's first vehicle was a quadricycle.
I think we tend to overstate the impact that certain industries had because we are judging from our perspective rather than the perspective of those times. Horses didn't disappear the moment the railroads appeared, and railroads didn't disappear the moment the automobile arrived. Although many railroads were started in the 1840s for the purpose of getting coal from the Appalachian hills to urban centers, the railroads themselves didn't switch to coal from wood until the last quarter of the 19th century. People used to write letters even after the telegraph. It has only been in the past 20 years (perhaps the last 10 or even 5) that instant ordering from stock has been adopted in the retail business, so how much benefit were we getting even from the phone? At one time, consolidation in the rail, then the steel, and then the oil industry had the country in an uproar. Today, those are minor industries.
Without incorporation, a cottage industry in personal liability insurance may have permitted similar advances. However, the costs would have been more internalized with the private insurance. Such insurance actually exists today: personal liability for doctors, nurses, and other professionals. I think stories about these costs driving doctors out of practice because of lawsuits should be discounted: the other possibility is that they are driven by interest costs (when rates fall, the insurance companies raise prices to keep profits steady) or by doctors trying to make a case for political action on their behalf. And here again, why is the insurance industry so consolidated (is it?)? Is it because of laws or economies of scale?
Kevin Carson offers a broad perspective of the traditional view of bigness here in the form of a draft chapter of a new book.
As to whether Democratic or Republican administrations abet corporations more -- as massive not passive argues (via the Mutualist blog) -- that's a puerile debate. For one thing, as I've repeatedly tried to get people to understand, the president only controls 1/3 of the mechanisms of the government. For another, Gabriel Kolko should be required reading for people interested in this kind of thing. Nevertheless,
- Civil Rights Act of 1866 - Johnson, R
- Civil Rights Act of 1871 - Grant, R
- Civil Rights Act of 1875 - Grant, R (boy, those Republicans sure were pro-civil rights!)
- Interstate Commerce Act (1877) (creating regional rail cartels) - Cleveland, D
- Sherman Antitrust (1890) - Benjamin Harrison, R
- Federal Reserve Act (1913) (made the government the lender of last resort and created a banking cartel) - Wilson, D
- Clayton Antitrust and Federal Trade Commission (both 1914) (requested by business organizations to quell stiff competition) - signed by Wilson, D
- Jim Crow Laws - Almost entirely created by Southern Democrats who dominated state legislatures and governorships, but made federal by Wilson, D (man, this guy Wilson is a really evil guy, eh?)
- National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) (attempt to cartelize all industries, based on Mussolini's corporatives) - Roosevelt, D
- Connolly Hot Oil Act (1935) (attempt to cartelize oil industry by establishing regional cartels) - Roosevelt, D
- Civil Aeronautics Board, (1940) (creating air transport cartels) - Roosevelt, D (man, this guy Roosevelt is really pro business, eh?)
- Civil Rights Act of 1957 (notably filibustered by Strom Thurmond (D)) - Eisenhower, R
- Civil Rights Act of 1960 - Eisenhower, R
- Clean Air Act (1963) - Johnson, D
- Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Johnson, D
- Clean Air Act (1966) - Johnson, D
- Civil Rights Act of 1968 - Johnson, D (Wow, what a great president. As a Democrat, he also would keep us out of an Iraq-like quagmire)
- Clean Air Act (1970) - Nixon, R
- OSHA (1970) - Nixon, R
- EPA (1970) - Nixon, R (hmmm, this Nixon guy sounds like he meets all of the standards of a Democratic activist, and he got out of Viet Nam)
- Clean Air Act (1977) - Carter, D
- Superfund (CERCLA) (1980) - Carter, D
- Natural gas deregulation (1978 and 1980) - Carter, D
- Transportation deregulation (1980) - Carter, D
- S&L deregulation (1980 and 1982) - Carter, D and Reagan, R (wow, this Carter guy sounds really pro-business with all this deregulation!)
- Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA) (1986) - Reagan, R
- Clean Air Act (1990) - Bush, R
- Civil Rights Act of 1991 - Bush, R (this Bush guy is a real left-wing go-getter, eh?)
- WorldCom scandal, 1999-2002, prosecuted 2002-2005, received no-bid contract with DoD in 2003 (bonus - what legal loophole created the opportunity? Hint: It wasn't something that would normally be thought of as pro-business, or pro-white-owned business, anyhow)
- Enron scandal, 1990s to 2001, prosecuted 2002-2006
- Tyco, 1993-1999, prosecuted 2004
- Dan Rostenkowski (D)
- Webster Hubbel (D)
- Jim McDougal (?)
- Jim Guy Tucker (D)
- Hazel O'Leary (D)
- Mike Espy (D)
- Ron Brown (D)
- Tom Delay (R)
- William Jefferson (D)
* How the devil do you put in non-English characters so they can be read by other browsers? Neither Word nor Writely seem to use generally accepted letters.
Labels: decentralization, history, politics, railroads, state-capitalism
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