It sounds like you’re suggesting regulatory capture effects would have led NCL to eventually lobby against segregation laws in order to make more money by better serving black Alabamians.
But isn’t it at least as credible that regulatory capture would have led NCL to lobby for the maintenance of segregation to deter competition from upstarts offering desegregated service to those who wanted it?
Regulatory capture usually offers to explain established businesses supporting regulation, or favoring forms of “deregulation” that end up entrenching them at the expense of new competition. So this might explain it if NCL had lobbied for anti-discrimination laws (thus forbidding whites-only competitors) but I don’t see how it would predict supporting merely the removal of segregation laws.
This line of thinking leads me to wonder how much predictive power the “regulatory capture” idea actually has …
It sounds like you’re suggesting regulatory capture effects would have led NCL to eventually lobby against segregation laws in order to make more money by better serving black Alabamians.
But isn’t it at least as credible that regulatory capture would have led NCL to lobby for the maintenance of segregation to deter competition from upstarts offering desegregated service to those who wanted it?
Regulatory capture usually offers to explain established businesses supporting regulation, or favoring forms of “deregulation” that end up entrenching them at the expense of new competition. So this might explain it if NCL had lobbied for anti-discrimination laws (thus forbidding whites-only competitors) but I don’t see how it would predict supporting merely the removal of segregation laws.
This line of thinking leads me to wonder how much predictive power the “regulatory capture” idea actually has …