Rescuing Regulation (Repost)

Fashions a new way of defending the importance of economic regulation. The traditional debate on governmental regulation has run its course, with economically minded analysts pointing to regulation’s inefficiency while those focused on justice purposefully avoid the economic paradigm to defend regulation’s role in protecting consumers, workers, and society’s disadvantaged. In Rescuing Regulation , Reza R. Dibadj challenges both camps. He squarely addresses the shortcomings of the conventional economic critique that portrays regulation as a waste, and also confronts those focused on justice to marshal economic arguments for public intervention against social inequities and abusive market behavior. Providing novel answers to the questions of why and how to regulate, Dibadj contends that the law and economics paradigm must not remain an apologist for laissez-faire public policy. He also demonstrates how incorporating the latest economics and revamping institutions can help improve our public agencies. Rescuing Regulation not only suggests ways to develop public institutions reflective of a democracy, but also broadly outlines how social science can inform normative legal discourse. “A truly original and even courageous book. It shows, with great power and effect, that the rational school is empirically unsupported, conceptually flawed, and normatively wrongheaded. But Dibadj does better: he points at alternative conceptions. The more people read him and heed him, the better we all shall be.” — Amitai Etzioni, author of The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics “A compelling defense of economic regulation and antitrust against the criticisms by the twentieth-century exponents of eighteenth-century economics—in which the distribution of income and of political and economic power are taken as ‘given’—and a correspondingly ambitious project for their reconstruction in the twenty-first century. I find the defense totally persuasive, and the proposed reconstruction thought-provoking and convincing.” — Alfred E. Kahn, author of The Economics of Regulation: Principles and Institutions “Dibadj provides students of the regulatory state with a thoughtful, balanced, and well-informed analysis of the ills and promise of regulation across a broad range of policy areas. He has written a useful primer for diagnosis and reform.” — Peter H. Schuck, author of Meditations of a Militant Moderate: Cool Views on Hot Topics