Readers of history know that government efforts to reduce monopoly power and protect the consumer often fall short. Some protect competitors rather than the consumer. Famous break-ups of large companies like Standard Oil and Alcoa have had little impact on the companies’ success. And regulators tend to be captured by the regulated [1]. So can government intervention be beneficial to a company—and also serve the community? Let me introduce you to Theodore Vail, president of AT&T in its early days. I learned about him from the great management guru Peter Drucker. You be the judge.
Theodore Vail, AT &T President
If you were reading the New York Times in 1913—or even Wikipeda’s “History of AT&T” today—you might think that Theodore Vail had succumbed to government pressure: The New York Times wrote about AT&T on Dec. 20, 1913: Continue reading “Theodore Vail Chooses Regulation”
The U.S. Forest Service has proposed renaming Wayne National Forest, a 240,000-acre forest in southeast Ohio. It has selected the name Buckeye National Forest. (Ohio is the Buckeye State.)
The forest honors Anthony Wayne, an important general in the American Revolution. But “Mad” Anthony (whose label was given for disputed reasons) also was a key figure in the Northwest Indian War, ousting Native Americans from much of Ohio. Understandably, American Indian tribes are encouraging the name change.
I have been opposed to the removal of statues for the sake of “woke” ideology. I’m also doubtful about renaming southern forts, even though they were named for mediocre Confederate generals in order to perpetuate Jim Crow (see this post). And I think renaming college buildings is mostly silly. Which North Carolina State college student wonders about the namesake of Daniels Hall—now labeled 111 Lampe Drive?
I was in college in the spring of 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he was sending combat troops—two Marine battalions—to South Vietnam. Thus, my professional life began in the decade of public debate, turmoil, and tragedy surrounding Vietnam.
What I didn’t know (among many other things, of course) was that the announcement of combat troops was disingenuous, one in a long line of disingenuous public statements from the president and his close associates. U.S. “advisers” had been quietly taking part in combat missions since 1961.[1]
Nor did I know that the seemingly sudden “Americanization” of a previously foreign war had been years in the making. Arch T. Allen, a retired attorney, brought this to my attention recently in a paper he wrote about the war. [2]
The Vietnam War, Allen points out, was managed behind a veil of duplicity. I suspected that in 1965, and the fact was confirmed in 1971, when the Pentagon Papers were leaked to major newspapers.
Each year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has a dinner in Washington, D.C., honoring the economist Julian Simon, who died in 1998. Simon was a rare optimist in the fields of population and natural resources. He disagreed with most environmentalists of his day (especially in the 1980s through 1990s). They feared passionately that growing population would overwhelm agriculture and industry and that the world would run out of natural resources such as oil and minerals.
Instead, Simon thought that more births are a good thing and was sure that resources would not disappear. His upbeat views were widely disparaged.
Ecologist Garrett Hardin called him “Dr. Pangloss,” compared him to a “fast change artist at a county fair,” and said he persuaded people with “sleight of hand.” [1] Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, and a leading alarmist wrote (along with his wife, Anne), that Simon was “the leader of a space-age age cargo cult” of economists and a “fringe character.” [2] They also called his qualifications those of a “specialist in mail-order marketing.”[3]
You may remember the extremely cold winter of 2021. In Texas, the system of electricity collapsed; 4.5 million homes lost power—for days. More than 200 people died, half of them of hypothermia (cold). This wasn’t supposed to happen, of course. Texas’s electric utilities are regulated and the regulation had been modernized beginning in 1999.
Why wasn’t the public interest served?
The issue is so complicated that I can’t answer that question. But the ongoing debate over the Texas tragedy has plunged me into a new project: trying to understand why electric utilities are regulated in the first place. Why do state commissions control the activities of companies like Duke and PNG that produce and send electricity to our homes?
That effort sends us back to colonial days in America. [1]
