As an unaccountable bureaucracy with a single head, the bureau will be susceptible to bureaucracy’s worst pathologies: a tunnel-vision focus on the agency’s regulatory mission, undue risk aversion and agency overreach. While a more coherent consumer-protection regime is needed, consumer-protection goals often can conflict with other goals, such as promoting competition, lower prices and expanded choice for consumers; and ensuring safety and soundness.
The FTC, which enforces identical consumer protection laws, is organized along functional lines, with attorneys and economists each writing memos to a bipartisan Commission. By design, this results in conflict between the economists and attorneys, which allows benefit-cost analysis done by economists to be heard at the highest levels of the organizations.
Watch the organizational design of the new agency. I suspect it will put economists, if it has them at all, under the supervision of attorneys to reduce their influence, as was done during the FTC early years.
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