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Regulation - Summer 2021 - Cover

Summer 2021

Vol. 44 No. 2
From the Cover

Birx Reconsidered

By David E. Harrington

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

By Pierre Lemieux

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.

Features
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
By Thomas M. Lenard

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”
By Thomas Grennes

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
By Pierre Lemieux

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.

In Review
Capitalism and Immorality
By George C. Leef

The unwritten pact between groups on the political right is now coming apart, with the defection of the social conservatives being especially striking.

Responding to Fears of AI
By Thomas A. Hemphill

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
By Jonathan H. Adler

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
By David R. Henderson

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.”

Final Word
Gamestopped
By Tim Rowland

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?