Another day, another spurious occupational licensing effort:

State Sen. Martin Golden and a handful of other lawmakers got what looked suspiciously like foot massages in the cavernous lobby of the Legislative Office Building. “They are looking for some of our brains,” Golden (R-Brooklyn) quipped as a member of the New York State Reflexology Association rubbed down his bare feet. [...] The group was in Albany pushing for passage of an Assembly bill that would require licensing of reflexologists and set competence standards.

As ever, the question here is what’s the market failure? The NYSRA can start a NYSRA Certified Reflexologist program if it wants, and then we’ll see if the competence standards required to get certified meet the market test. The difference between these kind of licenses and regulation we need is that it really doesn’t make sense to worry about a plague of bad foot massages being unleashed on the country. You can get rich polluting the air, so absent adequate regulation we’ll have too much air pollution. But it’s really hard to earn a living giving foot massages unless you have satisfied customers.

GP writes:

Prof. Mankiw posted the following link on his blog — saying that it demonstrated that the U.S. had the most progressive tax system in the developed world:

This was a bit surprising to me, so I was wondering if you had any thoughts? I’m inclined to dismiss it by noting that the US probably has the most unequal distribution of wealth of all those countries and, hence, that our tax system is not sufficiently progressive. Am I missing something?

The answer is that the column labeled “Share of taxes of richest decile” is in fact the share of income taxes paid by the richest decile. The federal income tax in the United States does, in fact, have a progressive rate structure. Federal payroll taxes, state and local sales taxes, most excise taxes, and property taxes all have a regressive rate structure. So, yes, if you look exclusively at the most progressive element of the American tax code, it’s highly progressive. If you compound that exercise by mislabeling your chart, then you can mislead people. You might think it’s a little strange that Greg Mankiw, an economics professor, would mislead people by uncritically endorsing such a misleading chart but Mankiw believes that progressive taxation is immoral and should be opposed even if it enhances human welfare. Perhaps this same moral theory leads him to believe that misleading people about the subject is an act of justice. If so, then I’m not sure it’s really in the interests of Harvard (or the many universities that assign his textbook) to entrust him with the instruction of teenage economics students.

I’m never that upset about reports of Americans’ widespread civic ignorance. The nature of our party system means that a voter can really only express a very crude kind of thumbs up or thumbs down preference at the ballot box, so it’s not clear to me how a more nuanced understanding of the world would actually effectuate itself in terms of policy change. But this is one of the reasons why I worry about the lack of accountability in our system. The way the system works, when it does work, is basically that the voters choose to send a bunch of representatives to Washington. Those representatives, in collaboration with their staff and sundry advocates and interest groups, try to figure out what should be done about various issues. And if things go well, then at the margin this helps incumbents. If things go poorly, then at the margin this hurts incumbents. Consequently, incumbent legislators are well-motivated to try to make sure that things go well.

That’s not necessarily ideal (I won’t invoke the “best system except for all the others line about representative democracy, which I think is too lazy about the possibilities of beneficial reform”), but it seems workable and sustainable. What doesn’t seem sustainable to me is the system we’ve been evolving toward in which a legislative minority is able to block action and then reap the rewards of any policy failure that results. This feature of our institutional set-up, much more than public ignorance, threatens to wreck the “market” for sound public policy.