Suppose I told you about a man who both favored gun control, pushing through legislation banning firearms, and who was arrested for gunrunning?\u00a0 Would you conclude that the man was unstable and irrational?\u00a0 Or maybe that he was simply a hypocrite?\u00a0 After all, how to unite this two opposing positions?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Our common ideas suggest to us that two opposites can never meet.\u00a0 Hot and cold don\u2019t exist together any more than light and dark do.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Upon this construction, many of us would rank opposites at extreme ends of a line \u2013 for every positive there is a negative.\u00a0 Thermometers are designed this way, and we tend to think about every other situation with ideas in opposition in the same manner.<\/p>\n
The most familiar notion of \u2018opposites\u2019, which we see daily within the political discussion that surrounds us, is the use of phrases like \u2018right\u2019 and \u2018left\u2019 to describe supposedly politically opposite points of view.\u00a0 The idea is\u00a0that the \u2018far right\u2019 and the \u2018far left\u2019 have nothing in common from a political perspective.\u00a0 But this notion is quite wrong and it is a fairly usual occurrence that \u2018right\u2019 meets \u2018left\u2019 on matters of regulatory policy.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
To see how \u2018right\u2019 can join \u2018left\u2019 in matters of regulation, consider the situation of those both for and against the use of alcohol during the age of Prohibition<\/a>.\u00a0 From the years 1920 to 1933, the United States made it illegal for anyone to produce or import, store, transport, or sale alcoholic beverages.\u00a0 These restrictions, codified into the Constitution through the 18th<\/sup> Amendment, were championed by a variety of religious and social welfare groups.\u00a0 The American Temperance Society, the Anti-Saloon League, and the Women\u2019s Christian Temperance Union were notable in their push for this amendment.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 Collectively, these voices were known as the \u2018drys\u2019.<\/p>\n The idea these \u2018dry\u2019 groups had was that the use of strong alcohol spirits rotted the moral fabric of society.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Several states experimented with the ban of the \u2018demon in the bottle\u2019, including Maine and Kansas. \u00a0Eventually the idea of federal alcohol ban caught hold, strongly backed by religious groups, predominantly comprised by the Methodists and Baptists, and women\u2019s groups exercising their new right to vote.<\/p>\n Once the 18th<\/sup> Amendment went into effect, Congress passed the Volstead Act to provide the legislative muscle to enforce the ban nationwide.\u00a0 Rather than eliminating the \u2018specter\u2019 of alcohol once and for all from the United States, Prohibition created a new segment of the economy called bootleggers and rum runners.\u00a0 These \u2018entrepreneurs\u2019 found a need they could fill, and a rich and complex black market was developed across the country.\u00a0 This underground economy was populated by some of the most notorious and socially unacceptable citizens the country has ever seen \u2013 the likes of Al Capone and Dutch Schultz.\u00a0 Because these criminal syndicates amassed huge fortunes providing illegal booze (often for the rich and well-placed), they also favored prohibition.<\/p>\n In the end, the country had two diametrically opposed groups, the moral and religious \u2018drys\u2019 and the immoral and criminal bootleggers, both on the side of Prohibition, with the rest of the \u2018wets\u2019 in the country suffering as a result.<\/p>\n This peculiar circumstance of opposite groups uniting around a common goal led the regulatory economist Bruce Yandle to coin the phrase Bootleggers and Baptists<\/a> to describe the situation.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/a>, including debates over global warming, gambling legislation, blood donation, wine regulation, and more.<\/p>\n And this brings us to Leland Yee<\/a>.\u00a0 For those who aren\u2019t familiar with him, Mr. Yee is a Chinese immigrant who, from the age of three, was raised in San Francisco.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Yee then moved onto the California General Assembly and finally to the California Senate.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 He authored controversial pieces of legislation banning sales of \u2018violent video games\u2019 to minors even though there is no well-established link between video games and violence. \u00a0\u00a0These laws were eventually ruled unconstitutional, but that didn't stop Yee from pressing the dubious connection between violence and electronic entertainment for years.<\/p>\n He then turned his sights on gun violence.\u00a0 A strong advocate for gun control, Yee was awarded a position on the Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll by the Brady Campaign.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He even appeared on the national show Stossel<\/em> on Jan. 18th<\/sup>, 2013 where he firmly defended gun control saying \u201cWhat is the lesson that we adults are saying to kids?\u00a0 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 The champion of California gun control was now accused of\u00a0orchestrating one of the state\u2019s largest, uncontrolled trafficking in guns. \u00a0Yee was now simultaneously playing both gunless and gunrunner.<\/p>\n Many people hang the hypocrite label around Yee and dismiss his behavior as an aberration of a man whose private conduct doesn\u2019t live up to the public standards he endorses.\u00a0 While true on the surface, this trite analysis fails to take into account the rational and intelligent course of action he employed. \u00a0His behavior was a direct consequence of enormous investiture of power in regulators at the state and federal level.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Leland Yee\u2019s rise and fall should serve as a case study for how the gunless and the gunrunners can ruin it for the rest of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Suppose I told you about a man who both favored gun control, pushing through legislation banning firearms, and who was arrested for gunrunning?\u00a0 Would you conclude that the man was... 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