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On November 15, 2019, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Technology, Innovation, and Regulation.” For this conference, scholars wrote and presented papers on the way regulation affects technological innovation, and vice-versa. The Gray Center convened expert panels on topics including whether social media should be regulated for “neutrality,” “regulatory sandboxes” and other laboratories of democracy, artificial intelligence and the future of regulation, and disruptive technology and the future of “law,” during which the new research was discussed. Keynote remarks were given by Kate Lauer, an Advisor for Jiko and former Head of Global Regulatory Strategy for PayPal.
The second panel looked at “regulatory sandboxes” and other laboratories of democracy, and focused on a paper titled “The Sandbox Paradox” co-authored by panelist Brian Knight of the Mercatus Center and Trace Mitchell, Research Assistant at the Mercatus Center. Brian was joined on the panel by Kathryn Ciano Mauler and Public Citizen’s Remington A. Gregg. The discussion was moderated by Paolo Saguato, Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, who is also an Affiliated Faculty Member with the Gray Center. The paper and videos are available at: https://administrativestate.gmu.edu/events/technology-innovation-and-regulation/.
Featuring Remington Gregg, Brian Knight, Kathryn Ciano Mauler, and Paolo Saguato.
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Good grief, where to start. While generally the discussion was a healthy one, the comments of Remington Gregg struck me as typical of the arrogant regulator, who knows little about business, but possesses an impenetrable conviction that government knows best, whatever the topic at hand. This mindset is sadly in overabundance among those who lack humility when faced with a complexity that, with only light-touch commonsense government oversight, the market is better suited to manage.
Speaking of the CFPB, the monstrosity largely brought to us at the behest of Elizabeth Warren, it is little more than a make-work organization born out of the demise of the obsolete OTS, proving that federal bureaucracies are indeed the closest thing we have on earth to immortality: refusing to die, even if they need to be resurrected to solve another government-caused financial disaster. The idea that the CFPB was the answer to the mortgage financial crisis requires one to believe that the fox should not only guard the henhouse, but that the fox should design and build it, as well. Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, the primary authors of the Dodd-Frank Act, were in a unique position to write the bill, having been two of the actors most responsible for causing the mortgage crisis it was fraudulently pretending to remedy.
And this mindset was typical of the last administration, the one that was going to lower your healthcare premiums and allow you to keep your doctor and your plan. And that decided the federal government should manage all student loans. Each of these was another “roll of the dice” that has caused, and is still causing, so much misery with so little accountability.
“Whether we’re talking about housing or medical care or education or unemployment or any other socio-economic problem we face, the roots are nearly always to be found in prior government tampering with the spontaneous order of free markets and civil society.” George Leef