From the Cover
Birx Reconsidered
The former Trump COVID adviser has been criticized for not leaving the administration, but her efforts saved thousands of lives.
The Problem with Politicizing Corporations
Corporate officers and shareholders are often naively caught in debates they don’t understand and act against their own interests and that of their customers.
Anticompetition in Buying and Selling Homes
The National Association of Realtors’ market power is hurting Americans’ mobility.
Reforming Michigan Vehicle Direct Sales Laws
Thanks to Tesla, the home of the U.S. auto industry could embrace a 21st century business model.
Features
Privacy and Free Speech
Government requirements that nonpolitical nonprofits disclose their donors strike at the First Amendment.
U.S. v. Google: A Tough Slog, But Also an Intriguing Possibility
Did Google pay billions of dollars for the “inertia” of mobile device owners, or for something else?
Undermining Innovation?
Digital economy startups can compete without competitive process antitrust
Can States Do a Better Job of Buying Drugs?
Hepatitis C medication data suggest that pharmacy benefit managers are better than direct government purchasing at controlling prices.
Briefly Noted
Privatizing Disaster Relief
The use of private contractors lessens the problems created by FEMA’s lack of experienced administrative staff, engendered by the ad hoc nature of disaster relief.
In Defense of Internet Data
The creative use of data is the basis for the success of many of this century’s great internet companies—predominantly American companies—whose revenue is primarily derived from targeted advertising.
Antitrust and “Big Pharma”
A favorable interpretation of the cooperation that resulted in a rapid response to the negative COVID shock is that it saved lives and reduced suffering by slowing the spread of the virus around the world.
The Problem with Politicizing Corporations
Corporate officers and shareholders are often naively caught in debates they don’t understand and act against their own interests and that of their customers.
On the Minimum Wage, Both Sides Have Their Economics Wrong
The proposed increase would do little to raise the net spendable incomes of many low-wage families but would boost the incomes of much-higher-income families.
In Review
Markets and Prescription Drug Addiction
The 1914 Harrison Act was the significant federal anti-drug legislation of the era.
Capitalism and Immorality
The unwritten pact between groups on the political right is now coming apart, with the defection of the social conservatives being especially striking.
The State of the Labor Movement and the Strike Tool
A GM line worker’s compensation was a black box of adjustments. Pay was docked when the lines shut down, even if it was not the worker’s fault.
Responding to Fears of AI
AI operating today is considered “artificial narrow intelligence” (ANI), which is defined as supporting specific processes with well-defined rules (and, incidentally, does not have any “intelligence” or “common sense”).
A Rearguard Defense of the Administrative State
Rather than offer the full-throated defenses of the administrative state each has offered elsewhere, in Law & Leviathan Sunstein and Vermeule suggest administrative law has developed a set of “surrogate safeguards” that enable the administrative state to protect public welfare while preventing the worst abuses of bureaucratic excess.
Overreacting to COVID
Precisely because some customers might want less human interaction because of their fear of the virus, “it was possible that businesses would devise all manner of ways to save on labor while meeting new or evolving needs of customers that they didn’t express before the spread of the coronavirus.”
Is Populism the Savior of Democracy?
The new populists were more radical than Franklin Roosevelt and often turned against him.
The Ignored Consequences of the Fed’s Interventions
Anyone who has followed the ups and downs of the financial sector and its fits of instability since 2007 remembers where things stood just over a decade ago.
Fighting Intellectual Exclusion
The academic world, the authors lament, has been falling more and more into fundamentalist thinking.
Working Papers
A summary of recent papers that may be of interest to Regulation readers.
Final Word
Gamestopped
So what to make of “meme stocks”— buying shares of failing firms for no reason other than to mess with professional traders looking to profit from those firms’ demise?