Brink Lindsey: belief

Transcript context

…Then why is the regulatory sector, as you argue in the book, so regressive? It’s both Congress and the President, right? Yes. Well, it’s a very interesting question. I think insider influence and shenanigans flourish in the shadows, flourish in obscurity and regulatory policy making, relative to fiscal policy making, I think is much less transparent, much more obscure, much more arcane, much more difficult for anybody to know what’s going on. At least in terms of big ticket, how big the budget is, how big the deficit is, what the top rate is. These are numbers that are publicly available, that people can argue about. Trying to quantify anything about regulation is devilishly difficult, and you immediately have to get into the weeds of this regulation or that regulation, so I think it’s much harder to police insider abuses in the regulatory sphere than it is in the fiscal sphere. Well, if the fiscal side is on net somewhat progressive and the regulatory side is regressive, what do you think of the null hypothesis that simply government as a whole, in terms of aggregate patterns, doesn’t change the distribution of wealth very much, period? As you probably know, Walter Scheidel, he has a fairly new book out called “The Great Leveler.” And he suggests that once you get inequality, it’s baked in. Those are the people, they have the money, they sort of control the state, and you never ever get rid of it unless you have a major war or some other active epic destruction. Agree or not?…

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