Watching You: Systematic Federal Surveillance of Ordinary Americans

To combat terrorism, Attorney General John Ashcroft has asked Congress to "enhance" the government's ability to conduct domestic surveillance of citizens. The Justice Department's legislative proposals would give federal law enforcement agents new access to personal information contained in business and school records. Before acting on those legislative proposals, lawmakers should pause to consider the extent to which the lives of ordinary Americans already are monitored by the federal government. Over the years, the federal government has instituted a variety of data collection programs that compel the production, retention, and dissemination of personal information about every American citizen. Linked through an individual's Social Security number, these labor, medical, education and financial databases now empower the federal government to obtain a detailed portrait of any person: the checks he writes, the types of causes he supports, and what he says "privately" to his doctor. Despite widespread public concern about preserving privacy, these data collection systems have been enacted in the name of "reducing fraud" and "promoting efficiency" in various government programs. Having exposed most areas of American life to ongoing government scrutiny and recording, Congress is now poised to expand and universalize federal tracking of citizen life. The inevitable consequence of such constant surveillance, however, is metastasizing government control over society. If that happens, our government will have perverted its most fundamental mission and destroyed the privacy and liberty that it was supposed to protect

From Claiming Credit to Avoiding Blame: The Evolution of Congressional Strategy for Asbestos Management

This paper develops a theory synthesizing credit-claiming and blame-avoidance explanations of congressional behavior and evaluates it against asbestos policy in the United States from the I920s through the I980s. Public policy is viewed as shaped by officeholders\u27 ability to achieve political ends through augmenting information costs and other transaction costs facing the public. Public perceptions are seen both as the endogenous product of congressional information-cost manipulation and as an exogenous constraint that changes in identifiable ways over time. Different policy stances - open credit claiming, concealed credit claiming, early-stage blame avoidance, and full-scale blame avoidance - are predicted to emerge in response to specified conditions, yielding implications about the expected timing of public policy changes. Specific types of transaction-cost manipulation are predicted to accompany the identified policy stances. The US asbestos policy experience is shown to be consistent with the predictions of the model

Passing the Affordable Care Act: Transaction Costs, Legerdemain, Acquisition of Control

Government officials in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 used a variety of methods to ensure its passage and entrenchment. The power of these strategies and tactics can be seen most clearly by viewing them through the analytical lens of political transaction-cost manipulation theory

Dodd-Frank: Accretion of Power, Illusion of Reform

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank or DFA) gained passage on the rationale that it would help the United States avoid future financial crises by creating new bureaucracies to fill regulatory gaps purportedly responsible for the crisis in 2008. This paper challenges both prongs of the crisis-prevention rationale: the “regulatory gaps” argument and the “beneficent new bureaucracies” contention. Citing pivotal DFA provisions, I describe the broad powers conferred on new federal bureaucracies: the Financial Stability Oversight Council, Office of Financial Research, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I also examine changes to the federal housing finance bureaucracy made by the DFA. The goal is to clarify the unprecedented authority and reach of these new bureaucracies-the DFA’s potent central core-not to analyze the statute’s full sweep. The evidence provided throughout is actual statutory law enacted before and after passage of the DFA. That evidence shows that the statute, although presented as an instrument of reform, has chiefly increased government power, consistent with Robert Higgs’s (1987) analysis of the link between crisis and the growth of government

REGULATION OF ASBESTOS THE MICROANA1YTICS OF GOVERNMENT FAILURE

This article analyzes the government's role in regulating asbestos-related health hazards in the United States. The U.S. government has served as both promoter and regulator of the U.S. asbestos industry, and this article examines the extent to which-in both capacities-it has hindered rather than facilitated the information dissemination essential to voluntary assumption of asbestos related risks. In documenting the behavior of the major government actors, this paper investigates the political and economic forces that have shaped U.S. asbestos policy. It shows how the Congressional transition from promoter to regulator of the asbestos industry can be explained by the susceptibility of political processes to transaction-cost augmentation by the bureaucracy. Copyright 1990 by The Policy Studies Organization.

Through the Mist: American Liberty and Political Economy, 2065

One certainty in writing about America\u27s political economy fifty years hence is that the author will likely be proven wrong. The best one can hope for is to try to appear wise (or at least thoughtful) in the process. Even if the future were determined solely by competitive markets, the outcome would be unknowable. But developments exogenous to private markets will greatly shape the future, making most predictions implicitly or explicitly contingent‒impossible to specify in detail without reference to those exogenous events