The Missing Card in the Denialist Deck of Cards

I'm sure many of my fellow wingnuts have encountered The Denialist Deck of Cards, a paper giving examples of the commonest anti-regulation arguments from alleged corporate shills. The paper missed an argument: the prediction that regulation frequently produces “regulatory capture,” in which the businesses being regulated are able to write the regulations in such a way as to produce or preserve an oligopoly. Regulatory capture was mentioned (under 9 of diamonds), but only as a perfidious tactic to twist regulations already being passed and not as an argument against starting to regulate.

This might be due to the assumption that the right wing consists of corporate shills. Corporate shills will be unlikely to mention regulatory capture. This might give us a way to find out which think tanks are real and which are fake. If a think tank mentions regulatory capture it is probably real.

Let's see … If we search on the website of The Cato Institute (an organization that's probably real), we find 12 “regulatory capture” hits. If we do a similar search at The Center for Consumer Freedom (an organization that might be bogus), we find no such hits.