OK Daren, did they teach you about deregulatory takings in law school? George Will notes here that the taxicab cartel in Minneapolis is asserting that the Fifth Amendment protects it from deregulation. The last sentence is a classic. I nominate Dwayne Andreas of ADM as the first person to leave under Will’s new system. (Here is James Bovard’s Cato article “ADM: A Case Study in Corporate Welfare.”)
When the taxi industry inveigled the city government into creating
the cartel, this was a textbook example of rent-seeking — getting
government to confer advantages on an economic faction in order to
disadvantage actual or potential competitors. If the cartel’s argument
about a “deregulatory taking” were to prevail, modern government would
be controlled by a leftward-clicking ratchet: Governments could never
deregulate, never undo the damage they enable rent-seekers to do.By
challenging his adopted country to honor its principles of economic
liberty and limited government, Paucar, assisted by the local chapter
of the libertarian Institute for Justice, is giving a timely
demonstration of this fact: Some immigrants, with their acute
understanding of why America beckons, refresh our national vigor. It
would be wonderful if every time someone like Paucar comes to America,
a native-born American rent-seeker who has been corrupted by today’s
entitlement mentality would leave.
