The Power to Regulate Is the Power to Control

In his 1819 opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall famously stated what everyone already knew, “the power to tax is the power to destroy.” Americans also knew that the power to regulate imposes costs too, so it is akin to the power to tax. And they are now relearning a lesson they should have never forgotten, that the power to tax or to regulate is also the power to control, not just in the supposed “public interest” but in the interest of the regulators themselves, or specific politicians, or the government more generally.

Once, companies could fight government mandates and win. Perhaps most infamously, during World War II, the Western Cartridge Company of East Alton, Illinois, successfully fended off the integration order of FDR’s Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), largely because white workers were willing to strike over the matter at a time when their output was desperately needed for the war effort.