Consequences of Transportation Regulatory Reform on Agriculture and Rural Areas: Discussion

present an idea in a favorable context he identifies it in purr words. If derogation is intended, snarl words are employed, Gray said. For a title to this session a choice among purr words is available. It could address regulatory reform or deregulation. The former was opted for. The term is the more accurate technically, but it has the further quality that it is so accommodating. It is malleable, elastic, ambiguous. Unfortunately, though, it is often regarded as synonymous with its alternate, deregulation. Sorenson, in his paper, is careful to dissociate regulatory reform from deregulation. The issue discussed does not fall into a regulation-deregulation dichotomy, he insists. "It is not a regulation versus deregulation debate but rather a search for that set of operating rules that most nearly fits collective concepts of equity, economic efficiency, and productivity growth." Yea, verily; but few commentators on transportation policy nowadays are so perceptive. Even the other papers in this set, those by Beilock, Freeman, and Fuller, and by Beilock and Casavant, are written as inquiries into alleged or real blessings of deregulation. The authors find the blessings to be real and considerable. To be sure, in the two papers protective caveats are thrown in at the end, but the authors extrapolate to a generalized endorsement of transport deregulation. My position regarding transportation policy has been favorable to regulatory reform on the terms I would specify but totally opposed to deregulation as a sweeping principle. I am particularly opposed to the revisionism in the Staggers Act as administered by an Interstate Commerce Commission that, in my judgment, displays ineptitude. The three papers are interesting and useful commentaries but it would be unscholarly to expand a couple of years' experiences in Kansas wheat and West Coast or Florida fruit, or even the several rural community trucking studies, into a generalized judgment on a naional transportation policy. I offer this caution on the basis of three reasons. First, the studies are essentially beforeand after-("' 'deregulation"). Temporal comparisons always violate the ceteris paribus condition for research. This axiom particularly applies to transportation studies made before and after so-called deregulation. In rail, the Staggers Act came into being almost precisely at the time rail carriage shifted from shortage to surplus. Although rate bureaus contributed to pre-Staggers inflexibility of rail freight r tes, by and large it was easy to keep rates high when freight cars were scarce. In fact, it is likely that rates would have been even higher w re it not for the regulatory restraints. Then when cars became super-surplus, there would have been pressure to ease rates without Staggers Act. The situation in rail freight changed so dramatically after Staggers that it would be irresponsible to attribute all post-Staggers events to the Staggers law. Moreover, we may find irony in the high probability that the lower rates the last couple of years would have represented an even sharper reduction, had the decline begun from a nonregulated starting point. By and large, regulation tends to keep the overall level of rates below what it would otherwise be during shortage of carriage, and higher during Harold F. Breimyer is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Missouri.