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Page 126
nopoly and is currently far more important. The Interstate Commerce Commission is an early example, and it has extended its scope from railroads to trucking and other means of transport. The agricultural program is undoubtedly the most notorious. It is essentially a governmentally enforced cartel. Other examples are the Federal Communications Commission, with its control over radio and television; the Federal Power Commission, with its control over oil and gas moving in interstate trade; the Civil Aeronautics Board, with its control over airlines; and the enforcement by the Federal Reserve Board of maximum interest rates that banks may pay on time deposits, and the legal prohibition of the payment of interest on demand deposits.
These examples are on a federal level. In addition, there has been a great proliferation of similar developments on a state and local level. The Texas Railroad Commission, which so far as I know, has nothing to do with railroads, enforces output restrictions on oil wells, by limiting the number of days when wells may produce. It does so in the name of conservation but in fact for the purpose of controlling prices. More recently, it has been strongly assisted by federal import quotas on oil. Keeping oil wells idle most of the time to keep up prices seems to me featherbedding of precisely the same kind as paying coal firemen on diesel locomotives for being idle. Yet some representatives of business who are loudest in their condemnation of labor featherbedding as a violation of free enterprisenotably the oil industry itselfare deafeningly silent about featherbedding in oil.
Licensure provisions, discussed in the next chapter, are another example of governmentally created and supported monopoly on a state level. Restrictions on the number of taxicabs that can be operated exemplify similar restriction on a local level. In New York, a medallion signifying the right to operate an independent cab now sells for something like $ 20,000 to $ 25,000; in Philadelphia, for $ 15,000. Another example on a local level is the enactment of building codes, ostensibly designed for public safety, but in fact generally under the control of local building trade unions or associations of private contractors. Such restrictions are numerous and apply to a considerable variety of

 
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