Bootleggers, Baptists, and the Global Warming Battle By Bruce Yandle and Stuart Buck:
The theory’s name is meant to evoke 19th century laws banning alcohol sales.
- Baptists supported Sunday closing laws for moral and religious reasons, while bootleggers were eager to stifle their legal competition.
- Politicians were able to pose as acting in the interests of public morality, even while taking contributions from bootleggers.
Yandle and Buck argue that during the battle over the Kyoto Protocol, he “Baptist” environmental groups provided moral support while “bootlegger” corporations and nations worked in the background to seek economic advantages over their rivals.
BAPTISTS? THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL INTEREST GROUPS By Todd J. Zywicki who specifies three testable implications of a public interest model of the activities of environmental interest groups:
(1) a desire to base policy on the best-available science;
(2) a willingness to engage in deliberation and compromise to balance environmental protection against other compelling social and economic interests; and,
(3) a willingness to consider alternative regulatory strategies that can deliver environmental protection at lower-cost than traditional command-and-control regulation.
Zywicki concludes that It has been argued that environmental regulation can be best understood as the product of an unlikely alliance of “Baptists and Bootleggers” – public-interested environmental activist groups and private-interested firms and industries seeking to use regulation for competitive advantage.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments