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One of the main themes of partisan dispute in the recent past (and doubtless in the foreseeable future) is whether or not the value of detailed governmental regulation of the economy exceeds the cost. This is exactly the kind of dispute that might be resolved by raising it from the level of mere partisan interest to the level of economic and political science. Unfortunately, however, it has not been raised because we do not have the necessary intellectual apparatus, namely, a theory about the motivation for, the operation of, and the consequences of regulation. As a result, most of the discussion consists of biased, ad hoc explanations of particular cases, with little effort to formulate and test alternative generalizations. We have, therefore, nothing but unresolved and unresolvable disputes about a more or less random collection of stories and some contradictory recipes about cause and effect.

This essay is an attempt to …