Table of Contents
Features
3 The National Bank Robbery
Within five years, industry analysts predict, just five networks will control 90 percent of ATM transactions. Fees to use these machines will go up, while community-based financial institutions will decline. Some states are fighting back--but can they win? By Stacy Mitchell
7 Franchising: The Worst of Both Worlds?
On abusive practices and the misuse of power. By Stacy Mitchell
8 Seeing the Light
The current rush to deregulate our electricity system is being driven by and for large customers and even larger suppliers. But the public interest can be better served if we take this historic opportunity to change the rules to encourage a more environmentally benign, humanly scaled, and democratic system. By David Morris
Paying for Past Mistakes
Who will be saddled with the stranded costs of the electricity system?
16 Sound Decisions
Noise is one of the most debilitating aspects of modern life. Yet more and more municipalities have taken action to preserve their communities' peace-the first steps toward setting a sound public policy. By Les Blomberg and David Morris
Making Waves
While jet skis churn up trouble on the nation's waterways, a billion-dollar industry tries to churn up trouble among levels of government. By Sean Smith
Departments
1 editor's note
Welcome to The New Rules, journal of The New Rules Project.
2 place rules
South Dakota Protects the Family Farm. Slow Food. Canada's Local Labor Funds. Prisoners and the Census.
editor's note
A new name. A new look. Why? Because we're talking about rules here and people have told us we might as well 'fess up to it up front.
This is a tough historical moment to talk about rules. For most Americans, rules are the problem. We agree-and disagree. Human societies always have and always will establish rules to govern their inhabitants' conduct. The question is not whether we will have rules-we will-but how they should be designed, and to what end, and by whom.
As to ends, let's be perfectly clear. The New Rules Project seeks to identify rules that enable strong communities. Place matters. Wherever possible, politics and economics should be coterminous.
Currently, public policy and public law move us in the opposite direction. I was reminded of this again by an exchange at a recent Minnesota conference on the farm crisis. One panelist argued that policy makers should nurture a diversified rural economy with many small- and medium-sized producers. The attorney from the antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department responded, "Those concerns are not relevant" to the application of existing federal law.
For the federal government, size per se doesn't matter. Nor does place. Indeed, back in the 1980s Ronald Reagan's antitrust chief reportedly insisted that, in theory, nothing in antitrust law would prevent one company from producing everything. We prefer former Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis's dictum, "The statement that size is not a crime is entirely correct'from the point of motive. But size may become such a danger in its results to the community that the community may have to set limits."
If place mattered, the burden of proof would be on those who would preempt local authority and foster concentrated economic power. Why, for example, as Les Blomberg argues in this issue, shouldn't communities be allowed to get a good night's sleep by banning nonemergency nighttime plane flights? Why, as I asked in an article in the first issue of this journal, shouldn't communities have the right to impose the same sales taxes on distant businesses that they do on local businesses?
For some, the idea of place is an antiquated and romantic conceit relegated to the dustbins of history by new information technologies and the rise of the global economy. Yet while down, the independent and rooted sector is by no means out. In preparation for a conference ILSR held last November in which the CEOs of place-based enterprises from two dozen sectors discussed how they could work together to insure their future, we discovered that almost 40 percent of all electricity customers in Minnesota own their own electric company. More than 400 community banks or credit unions hold more than 25 percent of all bank assets in the state. Minnesota is home to more than 20,000 independent farmers, more than 500 independent community pharmacies, and more than 30,000 second-generation family-owned businesses. These are impressive statistics by any measure. They reveal that in the battle for the hearts and minds of America community-based enterprises retain considerable clout.
There are economies of scale to production and distribution, to be sure. But the traditional axiom that larger production systems make cheaper products than smaller ones has been undermined by technological advances. And where economies of scale do exist, they may well be captured by cooperation rather than consolidation. Independent hardware stores, for example, appear to be weathering the onslaught of the Home Depots better than most of their locally owned retail brethren because of the buying, marketing, and service cooperatives they have created.
The New Rules is similar to its predecessor, Groundwork. We are still feeling our way in the search for the best vehicle for creating a national conversation about designing rules as if community matters. As part of that search, we have created a companion vehicle to this journal: The New Rules website at http://www.newrules.org/. Philosophy becomes concrete when you see it translated into law. The New Rules website contains a repository of actual rules - laws, regulations, codes, statutes, court decisions -that policy makers and others can download at their convenience. Any rules mentioned in this journal can be found on the website.
For those of you who subscribed to the first issue of Groundwork, thank you for your patience. For those of you who are new to this journal, welcome aboard. We invite your comments, observations and ideas.
David Morris
Vice President, Institute for Local Self-Reliance
© 1999 Institute for Local Self-Reliance
Questions directed to info@ilsr.org
phone: 612-379-3815
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