Charles Francis Adams, Jr., then director, and soon to become president of the Union Pacific… revealed to Long on March 1 why railroads were soon [in 1884] to bring all their weight behind the commission form of regulation. Indeed, he suggested the whole course of subsequent big business attitudes toward federal regulation: “If you only get an efficient Board of Commissioners, they could work out of it whatever was necessary. No matter what sort of bill you have, everything depends upon the men who, so to speak, are inside of it, and who are to make it work. In the hands of the right men, any bill would produce the desired results.”
Three years later, Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission, which just as Adams had hoped, gradually transformed the railroad industry into a government-run cartel, reversing the rapidly-falling rates of the pre-regulation period.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.