First principles

The eighteenth-century framing

Adam Smith — merchants in conspiracy

Smith identified the alignment of producer interests against the public as a structural feature of commerce, not a moral failure of individuals.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X, Part II, 1776.

Smith's prescription was not that government suppress trade associations — he viewed that as impossible — but that government decline to facilitate their conspiracies through licensure, tariff, and regulatory entrenchment. The lobbyist registry on this site, by surfacing every trade association that has formally retained a Carson City advocate, is a present-day implementation of Smith's observation.

James Madison — Federalist 10 and 51

Madison defined faction as the natural product of free society — a problem to be channelled, not eliminated.

"A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government."

— The Federalist No. 10, James Madison, New York Daily Advertiser, November 22, 1787.

Madison's structural answer was separation of powers and a constitutionally limited federal government. He was sceptical that any institutional design could fully resist faction:

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."

— The Federalist No. 51, James Madison, Independent Journal, February 6, 1788.

The lobbyist registry, the campaign-finance dataset, and the regulatory-board profiles published on this site are the ordinary tools by which a self-governing public exercises Madison's "external control."

Thomas Jefferson — vigilance as duty

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, Paris, February 22, 1787.

Benjamin Franklin — speech as defence

"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."

— Benjamin Franklin (as Silence Dogood), The Pennsylvania Gazette, November 17, 1737.

The nineteenth-century French inheritance

Frédéric Bastiat — the seen and the unseen

Bastiat warned that public policy is judged by visible benefits to organised interests while the diffuse costs imposed on everyone else remain invisible. His framework underlies every modern critique of industrial-policy subsidies.

"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen."

— Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas ("That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen"), Frédéric Bastiat, 1850.

Our tax-credits page is, in the most direct sense, a Bastiat exercise. The visible benefit (a Hollywood studio's announcement, a gigafactory's ribbon-cutting) is celebrated. The unseen cost (the General Fund revenue diverted, the small Nevada businesses that don't get a transferable credit, the productions that filmed elsewhere because Nevada's per-production cap was already used up) appears nowhere in the press release.

Bastiat — legal plunder

In The Law (1850), Bastiat identified the predictable sequence by which a community converts political coercion into economic gain: a faction captures the state, then writes the law to sanctify the capture, then writes the moral code to glorify the law. The transferable-tax-credit programs catalogued on this site are contemporary instances of the pattern Bastiat described 175 years ago.

The twentieth-century synthesis

Friedrich Hayek — the knowledge problem

Hayek argued that the data required to plan an economy is not available to any single planner — it is dispersed across millions of individuals and revealed only through prices. Centralised tax-incentive programs, written by lobbyists with privileged access to the legislator drafting the bill, are exactly the kind of knowledge-problem failure Hayek named.

— The Use of Knowledge in Society, Friedrich Hayek, American Economic Review Vol. 35, No. 4, September 1945.

His earlier The Road to Serfdom (1944) argued that industry-by-industry economic planning, even with democratic legitimacy, slides toward concentrated power because central planners need discretion the rule of law cannot constrain.

James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock — public choice

Buchanan (1986 Nobel laureate in Economics) and Tullock built the formal economics of political behaviour. Their core claim: public officials are utility-maximisers like everyone else; they should be modelled as such, not as benevolent neutral arbiters of the public interest.

— The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, James M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, University of Michigan Press, 1962.

From the public-choice framework: when the cost of organising a lobbying effort is low and the benefit (a tax credit, a regulatory carve-out, a contract) is concentrated, every rational actor will lobby. The legislature does not have to be corrupt for the outcome to look like corruption — it just has to be functioning. The lobbyist registry on this site is the logged output of that functioning.

Mancur Olson — concentrated benefits, dispersed costs

Olson formalised the asymmetry that gives small organised industries political success against large unorganised publics: small groups can monitor and discipline their own members; large groups cannot. Therefore the political system over-represents producers and under-represents consumers, taxpayers, and unaffiliated citizens.

— The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Mancur Olson, Harvard University Press, 1965.

Our government-as-client page and surveillance-vendor page are direct instances of Olson's pattern. A specific industry hires lobbyists to influence a specific bill that benefits it; the cost is dispersed across all Nevadans and visible to none.

George Stigler — regulatory capture

Stigler (1982 Nobel laureate) gave the theory its name. His claim was empirical and stark:

"As a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit."

— The Theory of Economic Regulation, George J. Stigler, Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 1971, p. 3.

The regulatory-capture page on this site is a direct application of Stigler's framework. Each Nevada regulatory commissioner whose immediately prior role was at a regulated company is a verified instance of the pattern Stigler named.

How to read the mechanism pages on this site

Each page below documents a present-day mechanism in 2026 Nevada that the corresponding thinker named long ago.

What this framework is not

This site is published from a classical-liberal / public-choice perspective, but it does not claim that the thinkers cited above would endorse any particular policy outcome the site might be perceived to advance. Smith, Madison, Bastiat, Hayek, Buchanan, Tullock, Olson, and Stigler each held distinct views on the proper role of government, and on which questions reasonable people could disagree. The framework is invoked here to name what we are seeing — not to prescribe what should be done about it.

The verification policy on this site is unchanged: every claim about a named individual or entity must trace to an authoritative source URL. The framework here adds context; it does not relax the standard. If anything, it raises it — a site that claims a Stiglerian heritage cannot publish a Stiglerian-flavoured allegation without first verifying the underlying fact.

Modern voices in the same tradition

Contemporary thinkers and political figures who work in the classical-liberal / public-choice tradition include Argentine President Javier Milei, who has frequently cited Hayek, von Mises, Friedman, Rothbard, and Bastiat in his public addresses; the Cato Institute and Mercatus Center scholarship; the Federalist Society's constitutional-originalist legal tradition; and the academic Public Choice Society founded by Buchanan and Tullock. Their work continues the conversation begun by the eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers cited above.

Reading list

• Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).
• James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, The Federalist Papers (1787–88).
• Frédéric Bastiat, That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen (1850); The Law (1850).
• Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944); The Use of Knowledge in Society (American Economic Review, 1945).
• James M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (1962).
• Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965).
• George Stigler, "The Theory of Economic Regulation," Bell Journal of Economics (1971).
• Robert D. Tollison, "Public Choice and Legislation," Virginia Law Review (1988) — applies Buchanan/Tullock to legislative practice.
• Bruce Yandle, "Bootleggers and Baptists" (Regulation, 1983) — explains why moralised coalitions and concentrated economic interests reliably converge on the same regulatory outcomes.