Revolt Against Regulation:
McKenna, James
The new battleground of regulation REVOLT AGAINST REGULATION THE RISE AND PAUSE OF THE CONSUMER MOVEMENT Michael Pertschuk Univ. of California, $12.95,192 pp. James McKenna ASSUME that in a...
...Congressmen feel they must respond to ever increasing numbers of special interest lobbies...
...The FTC is often portrayed today as retarding work-place productivity...
...The FTC's symbolic role as the honest cop, protector of the defenseless, was suddenly damaged...
...Pertschuk is not unrepentant...
...For example, what possible relation could a FTC rule requiring funeral directors to disclose the price of their lower priced funerals have on national productivity...
...Pertschuk allows John Kenneth Galbraith to explain it best: "It follows that the voice of economic advantage being louder regularly gets mistaken for the voice of the masses...
...But the net effect of his study of the consumer movement is to emphasize the importance of efficient government regulation in a modern democracy...
...Underlying Pertschuk's discussion of his many regulatory battles is his adoption of economist Charles E. Lindblom's theory that if citizens become confused over the conflicting claims of businesses and consumers, the position of business will win out...
...Pertschuk's many fascinating vignettes challenge such an image...
...Pertschuk is the former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and still serves as a commissioner...
...But as a congressman explained to Pertschuk, funeral directors can "kill" you politically...
...Michael Pertschuk's, Revolt Against Regulation explains why this has come to pass and suggests a currently unpopular solution: renewed reliance on regulation by government...
...As an example, Pertschuk describes the Senate Commerce Committee hearings on cigarette advertising...
...The many business lobbies were quick to sense a new weapon and began to fight symbol with symbol...
...Perhaps the FTC's slide from prestige can be traced to the March 1, 1978 Washington Post editorial against the FTC's consideration of restraints on children's advertising...
...He regrets regulatory waste and excess...
...But he does so with a newly-appreciative eye to the economies of a relatively free market...
...At great expense, the Tobacco Institute had combed the scientific universe in order to present testimony by thirty-eight doctors and scientists that questioned whether the causal relationship between smoking and health had been proved...
...Everybody in town knows them, they have the time to be active in community affairs, and they decide where you will sit at the steady stream of funerals a politician must attend...
...James McKenna ASSUME that in a democracy, vigorous debate is the food of health...
...The active voice of a regulatory agency such as the FTC can provide deliberative depth to today's political debates...
...Pertschuk explains that if an FTC rule results in consumers ordering $350 funerals instead of $3,500 funeral packages, the political repercussions will be real...
...We are hungry for serious, substantive ideas...
...Pertschuk's memoir of these years is a fascinating, often humorous, and finally disturbing view of political debate in this country...
...Yet the thousands of experts who believed otherwise were represented only by the spokesman for the American Cancer Society...
...The Post charged that the FTC had become a "National Nanny" and that officious government was now usurping the traditional role of parents...
...For the past eighteen years he has participated in the many victories and, more recently, defeats of the consumer movement...
...Rapidly, the FTC was painted as an expensive, wasteful meddler in fundamental institutionsthe family and the free market...
...Pertschuk embraces Franklin Roosevelt's concept of regulatory agencies...
...It is fed a steady diet of thirty-second political themes, beefy opinion surveys, small and large PAC contributions, symbols of every variety and form...
...Congress voted itself the power to strike down proposed FTC regulations and decreased the FTC's annual appropriation...
...Quoting Baudelaire's contempt of the human degradation that can result from obsession with profits, Pertschuk stakes out the place of a modern civil servant: "Between the analytical niceties of the cost-benefit analysis and the moral outrage of Baudelaire lies the battleground of regulation...
...Then, with today's endless elections and furious congressional sessions, you might think that the body politic is ruddy and rotund...
...Pertschuk believes legislative solutions to problems will typically be only symptomatic rather than systematic...
...Increasingly, the rhetoric of deregulation and productivity began to drown out the consumer complaints...
...They are "tribunes of the people," the opposing voices to "private greed...
...Probably little or none...
...But of course our democracy sometimes seems ill and ineffective, bloated in a way a poor person might be who can afford to eat only starches...
Vol. 110 • June 1983 • No. 11
