Gunless and Gunrunners

Suppose I told you about a man who both favored gun control, pushing through legislation banning firearms, and who was arrested for gunrunning?  Would you conclude that the man was unstable and irrational?  Or maybe that he was simply a hypocrite?  After all, how to unite this two opposing positions?  Well, Leland Yee is just such a man and, if you give me just a bit more of your time, I think I can convince you that he is an excellent example of how opposing viewpoints can rationally unite around a common goal.

Our common ideas suggest to us that two opposites can never meet.  Hot and cold don’t exist together any more than light and dark do.  As kids in school, our teachers presented the idea of the number line with numbers greater than zero to the right and those less than zero to the left.  Upon this construction, many of us would rank opposites at extreme ends of a line – for every positive there is a negative.  Thermometers are designed this way, and we tend to think about every other situation with ideas in opposition in the same manner.

The most familiar notion of ‘opposites’, which we see daily within the political discussion that surrounds us, is the use of phrases like ‘right’ and ‘left’ to describe supposedly politically opposite points of view.  The idea is that the ‘far right’ and the ‘far left’ have nothing in common from a political perspective.  But this notion is quite wrong and it is a fairly usual occurrence that ‘right’ meets ‘left’ on matters of regulatory policy.  The conceptual model is no longer a straight line stretching indefinitely in opposite directions but more like a circle wrapping back to close on itself.

To see how ‘right’ can join ‘left’ in matters of regulation, consider the situation of those both for and against the use of alcohol during the age of Prohibition.  From the years 1920 to 1933, the United States made it illegal for anyone to produce or import, store, transport, or sale alcoholic beverages.  These restrictions, codified into the Constitution through the 18th Amendment, were championed by a variety of religious and social welfare groups.  The American Temperance Society, the Anti-Saloon League, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were notable in their push for this amendment.  There was even a political party, called the Prohibition Party, which ran on a platform advocating abstinence from spirits (curiously it still exists to this day).  Collectively, these voices were known as the ‘drys’.

The idea these ‘dry’ groups had was that the use of strong alcohol spirits rotted the moral fabric of society.  Numerous problems were laid at the feet of alcohol consumption, including prostitution, domestic abuse, and declines in public health that affected the lower-class worker.  Several states experimented with the ban of the ‘demon in the bottle’, including Maine and Kansas.  Eventually the idea of federal alcohol ban caught hold, strongly backed by religious groups, predominantly comprised by the Methodists and Baptists, and women’s groups exercising their new right to vote.

Once the 18th Amendment went into effect, Congress passed the Volstead Act to provide the legislative muscle to enforce the ban nationwide.  Rather than eliminating the ‘specter’ of alcohol once and for all from the United States, Prohibition created a new segment of the economy called bootleggers and rum runners.  These ‘entrepreneurs’ found a need they could fill, and a rich and complex black market was developed across the country.  This underground economy was populated by some of the most notorious and socially unacceptable citizens the country has ever seen – the likes of Al Capone and Dutch Schultz.  Because these criminal syndicates amassed huge fortunes providing illegal booze (often for the rich and well-placed), they also favored prohibition.

In the end, the country had two diametrically opposed groups, the moral and religious ‘drys’ and the immoral and criminal bootleggers, both on the side of Prohibition, with the rest of the ‘wets’ in the country suffering as a result.

This peculiar circumstance of opposite groups uniting around a common goal led the regulatory economist Bruce Yandle to coin the phrase Bootleggers and Baptists to describe the situation.  The idea here is that the two groups, relatively small though they may be, provide the necessary ingredients for politicians to align with each of them.  The bootleggers provide the behind-the-scenes motivation through their possession of money while the Baptists provide the moral cover that a politician needs to look like he is acting in the interest of the common good.  Done in this fashion, the two-sided coalition between these opposite extremes can be far more successful in getting laws that favor their position than either a single side or the larger but unorganized middle can. Examples of the Bootlegger and Baptist mechanism can be seen in a variety of modern regulatory positions, including debates over global warming, gambling legislation, blood donation, wine regulation, and more.

And this brings us to Leland Yee.  For those who aren’t familiar with him, Mr. Yee is a Chinese immigrant who, from the age of three, was raised in San Francisco.  By education and profession he is a child psychologist, but within about a decade after he earned his PhD he had transitioned into politics, starting with his tenure on the San Francisco School Board.  Yee then moved onto the California General Assembly and finally to the California Senate.

During his tenure in the California State Legislature, Yee used his background as a child psychologist to provide a justification for a variety of weakly-supported positions on violence and gun control.  He authored controversial pieces of legislation banning sales of ‘violent video games’ to minors even though there is no well-established link between video games and violence.   These laws were eventually ruled unconstitutional, but that didn't stop Yee from pressing the dubious connection between violence and electronic entertainment for years.

He then turned his sights on gun violence.  A strong advocate for gun control, Yee was awarded a position on the Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll by the Brady Campaign.  In addition to his outspoken positions, Yee helped to craft two of the most restrictive gun laws at the state level in the entire country.  He even appeared on the national show Stossel on Jan. 18th, 2013 where he firmly defended gun control saying “What is the lesson that we adults are saying to kids?  That when you are a child and you grow up, to solve your problem, carry a gun. And that is not the life lesson we ought to be teaching children.”

Shortly afterwards, on March 26, 2014, charges that Yee had engaged in a conspiracy to deal $2.5 million worth of firearms without a license and to illegally import firearms from the Philippines surfaced.  The champion of California gun control was now accused of orchestrating one of the state’s largest, uncontrolled trafficking in guns.  Yee was now simultaneously playing both gunless and gunrunner.

Many people hang the hypocrite label around Yee and dismiss his behavior as an aberration of a man whose private conduct doesn’t live up to the public standards he endorses.  While true on the surface, this trite analysis fails to take into account the rational and intelligent course of action he employed.  His behavior was a direct consequence of enormous investiture of power in regulators at the state and federal level.  Every step he followed was consistent and logical if examined from the assumption that Yee was first and foremost interested in the welfare, benefit, and position of Yee.

The lesson here is that we should take care in requiring government to regulate our economic activities and in giving that government the power to do so.  When we make legislators and regulators arbiters of economic activity we endow them with the power to be brokers for small but vocal and influential special interest groups.  Leland Yee’s rise and fall should serve as a case study for how the gunless and the gunrunners can ruin it for the rest of us.

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