Must-Read: Brink Lindsey: Low-Hanging Fruit Guarded by Dragons: Reforming Regressive Regulation to Boost U.S. Economic Growth
Must-Read: The very sharp Brink Lindsey continues to try to find common bipartisan technocratic policy ground…
: Low-Hanging Fruit Guarded by Dragons: Reforming Regressive Regulation to Boost U.S. Economic Growth: “The U.S. economy is slowing down…
…Labor participation is falling, the pace of human capital accumulation is slackening, the rate of investment is in long-term decline, and growth in total factor productivity has been low for three of the four past decades…. Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians have a strong common interest in reversing this growth slowdown…. It is possible to construct an ambitious and highly promising agenda of pro-growth policy reform that can command support across the ideological spectrum. Such an agenda would focus on policies whose primary effect is to inflate the incomes and wealth of the rich, the powerful, and the well-established by shielding them from market competition… ‘regressive regulation’–regulatory barriers to entry and competition that work to redistribute income and wealth up the socioeconomic scale… excessive monopoly privileges granted under copyright and patent law; restrictions on high-skilled immigration; protection of incumbent service providers under occupational licensing; and artificial scarcity created by land-use regulation…. The contending sides are not divided along left-right or Republican-Democratic lines. And… it’s very difficult to find disinterested experts anywhere on the political spectrum who support the status quo. Such support is largely confined to the well-organized lobbies that profit from the current rules…