Lev Menand
speaker
1,295 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 17 Jul
Lev Menand’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's just that there wasn't this enormous amount of academic attention and then sort of proselytizing globally about it.
Nor is there much of a sense here, I think, that
We already have a very political bureaucracy in the United States.
The Treasury Department, layers upon layers of people are political appointments.
And in a lot of our other advanced economies, it's just taken for granted that communications policy is done by civil servants by and large.
So the first one of these independent multi-member regulatory commissions was called the Interstate Commerce Commission and Congress created it in 1887.
and congress envisioned it as like a specialized court because up until that point railroad regulation was enforced through the federal courts you would have a bunch of statutes and then you would bring cases against the railroads and federal judges would decide them and congress was dissatisfied by the ability of generalist judges to adjudicate these disputes they came to think
Actually, we need specialists who are experts in railroads, who have some understanding of these complex modern markets, who are going to develop the law that our common law-based system of economic regulation was obsolete.
And that's sort of the germ of what became the modern American administrative state with these sort of court-like bodies.
And so the Federal Reserve Board, which was created in 1913, is an interstate commerce commission-style body for banking.
They're supposed to be...
Judges of the banking system who have the ability to adapt the banking law to circumstances case by case in a way that wouldn't work very well if we were to use the federal judiciary and prosecution and have statutes cashed down in that manner.
And that was how Congress actually came to this.
And so communications, these are advanced economic sectors that need specialist judgment applied.
Of course, through the 20th century, these agencies evolve.
They start to pivot towards rulemaking.
And they do less and less of their policymaking through adjudication, through case by case
You know, that's an unfair method of competition.
Company X, let's have a sort of in-house FTC, you know, assessment.
They start to write general rules.
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