From the Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2014, on Crony Capitalism

Paul H. Rubin —  8 July 2014

My son Joe and I have an op-ed in today’s WSJ that should stir up some controversy.

Opinion Wall Street Journal

The Case for Crony Capitalism

Many government regulations choke off entirely legal avenues of potential bank profits.

By

Paul H. Rubin And

Joseph S. Rubin

July 7, 2014 7:34 p.m. ET

Economics has a formal “theory of the second best” that in simplified terms may be expressed this way: If a government intervention leads to inefficiencies in markets but can’t be eliminated, an additional intervention may be the next-best alternative to eliminate the inefficiencies caused by the first.

It’s not the optimal solution to government-induced inefficiency, but it may be the best we can do. And it applies in many cases to what today is variously called “corporate welfare,” “loopholes,” or even “crony capitalism.”

The U.S. economy is rife with inefficient interventions—laws, regulations, taxes and subsidies that lead to inefficient markets. What some disparage as crony capitalism is in many cases an attempt to reduce the costs of these interventions.

Consider the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that assists U.S. firms in financing international transactions. A first-best efficient policy would be to eliminate the agency, on grounds that if private banks will not finance a transaction, then the transaction is not worthwhile. The government shouldn’t become the financier of otherwise unprofitable transactions.

Yet that’s not the whole story. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, for example, makes it illegal for U.S. businesses to pay bribes to foreign officials. But it is not always so easy to determine what is illegal, and companies may be penalized for normal business practices. It is certainly not cheap to comply. The Ex-Im Bank website says that “to avoid such consequences [of the FCPA], many firms have implemented detailed compliance programs intended to prevent and to detect any improper payments by employees and by third-party agents.”

This adds to the costs of U.S. firms doing business abroad, lowering the amount of legitimate trade. Maybe the Ex-Im Bank is a reasonable, second-best response. One government subsidy may be necessary to help overcome other inefficiencies imposed by the government to begin with.

The banking bailout is another purported example of cronyism and corporate welfare. The poor lending practices of banks were undoubtedly part of the cause of the Great Recession. But banks, as well as government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae FNMA +0.50% and Freddie Mac, FMCC +0.51% were under tremendous pressure to make loans to unqualified borrowers.

Many other government regulations choke off entirely legal avenues of potential profit for banks by limiting with whom and under what circumstances they may do business. Examples include the financing of online and payday lenders, and firms that process payments for these lenders. If regulations cause banks to take excessive risks and limit profits, it may be efficient to provide some protection from these risks when things go bad, particularly if the damage is in large part caused by government policies.

Some claim that Medicare Part D, which pays for drugs, was a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry. But 40 years of research has clearly shown that the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory process makes drug development and approval unnecessarily and inefficiently expensive. Perhaps, in this environment, supplementing the costs of drugs may move us toward a more efficient drug policy, and bring more life-saving drugs to market.

Corporate taxes are too high, retarding investment. But when cutting rates is impossible, maybe tax breaks that encourage investment of various sorts is the second-best response. Environmental Protection Agency regulations are costly and inefficient. In some cases waivers or exceptions are less a payoff to cronies than a way to counter inefficient restrictions.

A second-best world is messy, and there may be better ways to overcome government-induced inefficiency. Yet sometimes what appear to be special favors may actually be moves in the direction of efficiency.

Of course, some examples of crony capitalism are worthy of the term, and the scorn that goes with it. For example, the various farm price-support programs, including sugar quotas and the ethanol program, which raise food prices world-wide and increase poverty, would be very difficult to justify under any second-best theory.

Nonetheless, as long as there is a push for more regulation, and particularly inefficient regulation, with little opportunity to rein in the already severe drag that these regulations impose on the economy, second-best solutions may be useful to temper some of their costs.

Paul H. Rubin is an economics professor at Emory University. His son, Joseph S. Rubin, is an attorney at Arnall Golden Gregory LLP in Washington, D.C.

 

 

Paul H. Rubin

Posts

PAUL H. RUBIN is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University in Atlanta and formerly editor in chief of Managerial and Decision Economics. He blogs at Truth on the Market. He was President of the Southern Economic Association in 2013. He is a Fellow of the Public Choice Society and is associated with the Technology Policy Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Independent Institute. Dr. Rubin has been a Senior Economist at President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, Chief Economist at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Director of Advertising Economics at the Federal Trade Commission, and vice-president of Glassman-Oliver Economic Consultants, Inc., a litigation consulting firm in Washington. He has taught economics at the University of Georgia, City University of New York, VPI, and George Washington University Law School. Dr. Rubin has written or edited eleven books, and published over two hundred and fifty articles and chapters on economics, law, regulation, and evolution in journals including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Legal Studies, and the Journal of Law and Economics, and he frequently contributes to the Wall Street Journal and other leading newspapers. His work has been cited in the professional literature over 8000 times. Books include Managing Business Transactions, Free Press, 1990, Tort Reform by Contract, AEI, 1993, Privacy and the Commercial Use of Personal Information, Kluwer, 2001, (with Thomas Lenard), Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom, Rutgers University Press, 2002, and Economics, Law and Individual Rights, Routledge, 2008 (edited, with Hugo Mialon). He has consulted widely on litigation related matters and has been an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office on tort reform. He has addressed numerous business, professional, policy, government and academic audiences. Dr. Rubin received his B.A. from the University of Cincinnati in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1970.

5 responses to From the Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2014, on Crony Capitalism

  1. 

    Interesting Read

  2. 

    Rubin, summary: The government passes bad laws, so let’s eliminate the rule of law in the name of efficiency.

    This reminds me of comments by Obama that “It would be easier to be President of China”.
    ( http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/11/obama-gee-it-would-be-easier-to-be-president-of-china/ )

    The old joke and justification for arbitrary power was that Mussolini made the trains run on time.

    There is some opinion that Congress passes bad law to enable graft and cronyism. Let’s not elevate cronyism and arbitrary power by putting “capitalism” into “crony capitalism”. I prefer crony socialism, which is what it truly is.

    Rubin recommends somewhat fixing prior bad acts by supporting following bad acts. The result is to excuse thugocracy where no one can tell if arbitrary power is being used to break or fix the system. Spare me the intellectual opinion that there are some good effects from unchecked centralized power.

    ( easyopinions.blogspot.com/2010/01/good-side-of-dictatorship.html )
    The Good Side of Dictatorship

    All powerful governments do some good things. So what?

  3. 

    And you might have added that as the inefficiency of the first regulation is larger, so is the incentive to spend money lobbying to get a second-best solution. Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like part of Paul Rubin’s theory of common law efficiency. Hmm, a theory of efficient regulation?

    There does, however, seem to be a possible pitfall in this line of analysis: it does not foreclose endless cycling of inefficient regulation followed by efficiency-inducing second-best regulation followed by corrections of that, etc., etc., etc.

Trackbacks and Pingbacks:

  1. A Reply to the Rubins on Crony Capitalism |Legal Magazine - July 14, 2014

    […] Paul H. Rubin and Joseph S. Rubin advance the provocative position that some crony capitalism may be… With all due respect, I am not convinced by their defense of government-business cronyism.  “Second best correction” arguments can be made with respect to ANY inefficient government rule.  In reality, it is almost impossible to calibrate the degree of the distortion created by the initial regulation, so there is no way of stating credibly that the “counter-distortion” is on net favorable to society.  More fundamentally, such counter-distortions are the products of rent-seeking activities by firms and other interest groups, which care nothing about the net social surplus effects of the first and counter-distortion.  The problem with allowing counter-distortions is that firms that are harmed thereby (think of less politically connected companies that are hurt when a big player takes advantage of Export-Import Bank subsidies) either will suffer, or will lobby (using scarce resources) for “third-line” or “tertiary” distortions to alleviate the harmful effects of the initial counter-distortions.  Those new distortions in turn will spawn a continuing series of responses, causing additional unanticipated consequences and attendant welfare losses. […]

  2. A Reply to the Rubins on Crony Capitalism « Truth on the Market - July 10, 2014

    […] Paul H. Rubin and Joseph S. Rubin advance the provocative position that some crony capitalism may be… With all due respect, I am not convinced by their defense of government-business cronyism.  “Second best correction” arguments can be made with respect to ANY inefficient government rule.  In reality, it is almost impossible to calibrate the degree of the distortion created by the initial regulation, so there is no way of stating credibly that the “counter-distortion” is on net favorable to society.  More fundamentally, such counter-distortions are the products of rent-seeking activities by firms and other interest groups, which care nothing about the net social surplus effects of the first and counter-distortion.  The problem with allowing counter-distortions is that firms that are harmed thereby (think of less politically connected companies that are hurt when a big player takes advantage of Export-Import Bank subsidies) either will suffer, or will lobby (using scarce resources) for “third-line” or “tertiary” distortions to alleviate the harmful effects of the initial counter-distortions.  Those new distortions in turn will spawn a continuing series of responses, causing additional unanticipated consequences and attendant welfare losses. […]