That’s the title of a new book by former Duke Law School professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a dyed in the wool leftist who believes that we need much more federal regulation to improve society. His book receives an unfriendly review in today’s Wall Street Journal.
What starry-eyed academics like Chemerinsky don’t understand is that regulations are almost always the means by which interest groups achieve their objectives. Furthermore, the politicians who enact them don’t bear the cost of being wrong (think of the harm done by minimum wage legislation, for example) and for that reason they persist for decades and even centuries (our antitrust mania is now over a century old) despite the damage they do to freedom and economic efficiency.
