GOVERNMENT REGULATION IS GOVERNMENT MONOPOLY:
THE EXAMPLES OF BRITISH AGRICULTURE AND THE BRITISH STOCK EXCHANGE
SEÁN CRONIN
Pretty much everyone agrees that monopolies — government-run or government-backed, coercive controls over the production, distribution or purchase of particular categories of product or service — are bad for society, i.e. for pretty much everybody. One only has to remember the record of British Leyland — a government industrial monopoly that did considerably more damage to the British motor industry than the Luftwaffe — to see that monopolies are harmful.1 The only exception to this generally agreed belief seems to run along the lines of “all monopolies are bad except when I or my friends are in control ”, which helps to explain why monopolies are so popular with governments. So this essay will not attempt to argue that monopolies are bad, any more than it will attempt to argue that the earth is round. The point I wish here to make is that monopolies, because they are so much more numerous, are accordingly causing much more harm, than is commonly thought. I will focus on two examples, both of which show a monopoly in action and doing great harm, even though at first glance there doesn’t appear to be any monopoly at all. EVERY GOVERNMENT REGULATORY AGENCY IS A MONOPOLY The first example is the long running saga of BSE. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy is a disease suffered by British beef cattle during the nineteen eighties and nineties, which is believed to be caused by unsatisfactory feeding practices — feeding bits of cows to other cows. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), which is a similar and fatal disease suffered by a tiny handful — so far — of humans, is now believed to result from eating BSE infected meet. This circumstance lead to a European Union ban on all British beef exports, which at the time when this essay was written (January