This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 18th,

2022. I'm Caleb Brown. In local, state, and sometimes federal

regulations, a permission-based market has replaced a free-wheeling one.

And it's actually worse than that, according to Will Reinhart

at the Center for Growth and Opportunity, he says the discretion given to regulators creates too many

ways for the state to veto transactions and new enterprises and finding ways to dramatically curtail this

vitocracy should be top of mind for lawmakers.

We spoke last month in Las Vegas.

So for those of you who weren't listening when we weren't recording,

Will and I were trying to come up with a pithy term that beats Francis Fukuyama's

vitocracy. Vietocracy.

Vietocracy.

And the term Vietocracy refers to what?

The term Vitocracy refers to this tendency in our institutions to have overlapping veto powers.

What we've seen rise, especially in the last 10, 20 years, is that it's really easy to say no. The best example that I can think

about that about this is this recent UC Berkeley perfuffle where one guy

said he did not want any new people coming into Berkeley

so he stopped the entire school from expanding he stopped a massive school

expansion over over this this issue he just didn't want more people in his Berkeley neighborhood.

So he filed a request under Sequa and was able to stop the entire process.

Sequa being the California Environmental Quality Act.

It's their version of the Environmental Protection Act

...