Politics makes strange bedfellows, including alliances of profiteers and moralists who lobby for the same regulations, but for vastly different reasons. Whether such coalitions promote alcohol prohibition (as did the bootleggers and Baptists to whom similar “unholy alliances” are likened), tobacco restrictions, NAFTA, or climate-change policies, political entrepreneurs are the glue that holds them together.
Randy Simmons is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, and Professor of Economics at Utah State University.
Diana W. Thomas is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute for Economic Inquiry in the Heider College of Business at Creighton University, and Co-Editor of The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy.
Ryan M. Yonk is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Senior Research Faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research.
Bureaucracy and GovernmentClimate ChangeEconomyEnergy and the EnvironmentEnvironmental Law and RegulationGovernment and PoliticsLaw and LibertyPolitical TheoryPublic Choice
Other Independent Review articles by Randy Simmons
Fall 2015 Tapping Water Markets
Spring 1999 Fixing the Endangered Species Act
Winter 1998/99 The Endangered Species Act: Who’s Saving What?
Other Independent Review articles by Diana W. Thomas
Winter 2022/23 Plutocratic Socialism: The Future of Private Property and the Fate of the Middle Class
Spring 2018 The Rise of the Regulatory State: Institutional Entrepreneurship and the Decline of Markets for Blood
Other Independent Review articles by Ryan M. Yonk
Summer 2017 From Equality and the Rule of Law to the Collapse of Egalitarianism