Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘lobbyists’

“Sock Puppets: How the Government lobbies itself and why”

Christopher Snowdon for the U.K.’s Institute for Economic Affairs, in an analysis [PDF] of the government’s penchant for funding private advocacy:

This paper argues that there is a deeper problem if government funds and/or creates pressure groups with the intention of creating a ‘sock puppet’ version of civil society which creates the illusion of grassroots support for new legislation. These state-funded activists engage in direct lobbying (of politicians) and indirect lobbying (of the public) using taxpayers’ money, thereby blurring the distinction between public and private action.

• State-funded charities and NGOs usually campaign for causes which do not enjoy widespread support amongst the general public (e.g. foreign aid, temperance, identity politics). They typically lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, greater regulation and the creation of new agencies to oversee and enforce new laws. In many cases, they call for increased funding for themselves and their associated departments. In public choice terms, they are ‘concentrated interests’ compelling the taxpayer to meet the costs that come from their policies being implemented, as well as the costs of the lobbying itself.

Snowdon’s analysis could be carried over to the equivalent institutional arrangements in the U.S. with relatively little change.

Meanwhile, hmm: Amtrak will give you a fare discount if you join a group that supports Amtrak subsidies [Jonathan Adler]

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The trouble with Nicholas Kristof, cont’d

The other day the Chicago Tribune documented a longstanding campaign (see Friday link) to get government bodies to adopt standards requiring flameproofing of furniture upholstery, carpets and other household materials. Turns out key actors in that campaign were companies that make the chemicals used in flameproofing, which thereby guaranteed themselves a giant market for their products, as well as cigarette companies that worried that they would face regulatory and legal pressure over fires caused by careless smoking and decided to pursue a strategy of turning the issue into someone else’s problem.

Unfortunately, according to the Tribune series, the supposedly flameproof furnishings 1) aren’t necessarily very good at reducing fire risk and 2) are doused with chemicals that one might not want rubbing off on one’s family and pets. That’s aside from the regulations’ obvious cost in making furnishings more expensive and narrowing consumer choice by excluding producers unable or unwilling to use the chemical treatments. Whether or not you accept the series’ interpretation in all respects — the authors tend to taken an alarmist line, for example, on the chemicals’ environmental dangers — it’s useful as reminder #83,951 that government regulation often is driven by motives quite different from those advertised, and in particular by business lobbies whose interest is frequently squarely opposed to laissez-faire.

On Sunday, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, criticized lately in this space for his views on supposed Big Beer responsibility for Indian reservation alcoholism, addressed the flameproofing story in his column. After reciting the controversy — laying a particular emphasis on chemical alarmism, long a specialty of his — Kristof concludes as follows:

This campaign season, you’ll hear fervent denunciations of “burdensome government regulation.” When you do, think of the other side of the story: your home is filled with toxic flame retardants that serve no higher purpose than enriching three companies. The lesson is that we need not only safer couches but also a political system less distorted by toxic money.

Which affords James Taranto of the WSJ’s “Best of the Web” this response:

The guy is so blinded by ideology that he fails to notice he has just given an example of burdensome government regulation.

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Punitive moralism and Wal-Mart’s Mexico mess

I’ve got a new opinion piece up at the Daily Caller on some relevant angles of the unfolding Wal-Mart FCPA story, including the feds’ growing crackdown on low-level “facilitating payments” that had previously been considered lawful, the potentially confiscatory effects of something called the Alternative Fines Act, and the question of why FCPA fines and settlements should be going to the U.S. Treasury, “which was surely not the victim of the Mexican bribe-paying, if victims there were.” Earlier here, here and (at Cato) here; and link thanks to Scott Greenfield (a must-read), Point of Law, Chris Fountain, Steve Bainbridge, and Coyote.

Plus: Scoop! Must credit Washington Post! Wal-Mart (like much of the rest of American business) has backed FCPA reform! In above-the-fold coverage with no fewer than three reporters’ bylines — though it does little more than recycle a meme that bounced around left-wing websites all day Tuesday — the Washington Post darkly warns that the giant retailer has been a member of broad business coalitions pressing various FCPA reforms “that, some advocacy groups argue, would eviscerate the Watergate-era anti-corruption statute.”  “There is no evidence,” the paper is constrained to concede to the disappointment of Some Advocacy Groups, “that suggests Wal-Mart participated in the Chamber’s efforts because of its problems in Mexico.”

The Post notes that the campaign is led by what it bizarrely describes as the U.S. Chamber’s “little-known” Institute for Legal Reform. Yet the Post’s own index indicates that the “little-known” Institute has gotten seven mentions in the paper within the past 12 months, mostly for its advocacy on FCPA reform. Indeed, the Post itself has covered the FCPA debate in some depth over the past year, and its editorialists have ardently defended the law (perhaps “Watergate-era” should serve as some kind of tipoff phrasing.)

It would be one thing if Wal-Mart’s Washington reps had shown some sort of special dislike of FCPA not shared by other American firms that do business in developing countries. But the real story here is how broad and pervasive the discontent with the law is among American businesses with international operations. They consider it unrealistic, incapable of reliable compliance, punitive and constantly changing in its interpretations. Wouldn’t the Post do better to begin listening to them, rather than demonize their efforts to petition Washington for redress?

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March 6 roundup

  • D.C. Circuit’s Janice Rogers Brown: three-decade-long case over Iran dairy expropriation raises “harshest caricature of the American litigation system” [BLT]
  • Legal blogger Mark Bennett runs for Texas Court of Criminal Appeals as Libertarian [Defending People, Scott Greenfield] And Prof. Bill Childs, often linked in this space, is departing TortsProf (and legal academia) to join a private law practice in Texas;
  • Ambitious damage claims, more modest settlements abound in Louisiana oil-rig cleanup suits [ATLA’s Judicial Hellholes, more, more, earlier]
  • Better no family at all: Lawprof Banzhaf jubilant over courts’ denial of adoption to smokers [his press release]
  • “The worst discovery request I’ve ever gotten” [Patrick at Popehat] And yours?
  • Concession to reality? Class action against theater over high cost of movie snacks seen as dud [Detroit Free Press]
  • FCPA is for pikers, K Street shows how real corruption gets done [Bill Frezza, Forbes] Dems threatening tax-bill retribution against clients whose lobbyists who back GOP candidates [Politico]

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