Government By 'Expert'

[Valin]

The Hoover Institute:

 

The modern administrative state is a behemoth incompatible with the rule of law.

Richard A. Epstein

3/6/12

 

Over the weekend, I participated in the 31st Annual Student Symposium of the Federalist Society held at the Stanford Law School. The title of the symposium was “Bureaucracy Unbound: Can Limited Government and the Administrative State Co-Exist?”

 

(Snip)

 

The modern administrative state does not and cannot renounce these types of government action. But its new extensive duties put too much strain on its own ever-fragile institutions. The first example of the modern administrative state was the Interstate Commerce Commission, established in 1887 to regulate railroad rates across the United States. The commission was introduced to counteract the rate anomalies that arose precisely because the railroads were network industries whose interconnection obligations made it impossible for them to operate along purely competitive lines. The original ICC was charged with making sure that short-haul rates (that rose in the absence of competition) did not exceed rates on long-haul lines between major destinations, which were kept low by competition.

 

(Snip)

 

 

Faced with these obstacles, the Progressives had to develop rationales to justify these broad grants of administrative power, which were articulated in canonical form by the legal academic and government advisor James Landis in his classic 1938 volume, The Administrative Process. Landis took the then-fashionable view that market institutions were haphazard bodies that could not process the plethora of technical information needed to make rational investment or business decisions. In their place should be government experts and neutral government officials who would take on the essential task of overseeing these market institutions. These individuals would be largely appointed by democratically-elected public officials, but would by virtue of their delegated authority be insulated from day-to-day political pressures. The system of strong property rights would give way to a new system, where various interest groups would participate in hearings concerning their affairs. The procedural safeguards surrounding the deliberations before these independent administrative agencies would preserve, it was claimed, the old rule of law values in a new setting.

 

(Snip)

[Draggingtree]

Valin good article on The Hoover Institute: