America's Fear of Competition

How cronyism and rent-seeking replaced "creative destruction."

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009, at 6:51 AM ET

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Although everybody claims to love the market, nobody really likes the rough-and-tumble of competition that produces the essential "creative destruction" of capitalism. At bottom, this abhorrence of competition and change are the common theme that binds together the near death of the American car industry, the collapse of the credit market, the implosion of the housing market, the SEC's disastrous negligence, the Madoff Ponzi scheme, and the other economic catastrophes of recent months.

Consider the examples of the SEC and GM, which would appear to have nothing to do with each other. The traditional critiques of the SEC have been that it was underfunded and didn't have up-to-date laws needed to regulate sophisticated financial transactions in evolving markets. That's not accurate. The SEC is a gargantuan bureaucracy of 3,500 employees and a budget of $900 million—vast compared with the offices that actually did ferret out fraud in the marketplace. And the general investigative powers of the SEC are so broad that it needs no additional statutory power to delve into virtually any market activity that it suspects is improper, fraudulent, or deceptive. After each business scandal (Enron, Wall Street analysts, Madoff …), the SEC claims a need for more money and statutory power, yet those don't help. The SEC has all the money and people and laws it needs. For ideological reasons, it just didn't want to do its job, and on the rare occasions when it did, it didn't know how.