AI is hardly the first industry where the big guys demanded regulation

Rahm Emanuel over the weekend asserted that it was historic — unprecedented — that the CEOs of the biggest artificial intelligence companies want federal regulation of AI.

Emanuel is trying to argue that, of course, we need federal regulation of A.I. today, if even the biggest businesses in the industry want it. The premise of his claim is that this particular demand for regulation should get extra weight because it is almost an admission against interest, as attorneys would put it.

But this is totally false, and Emanuel knows it. Companies lobby to be regulated all the time, especially the biggest companies. They do this because it gives them a competitive advantage. Big Government is a home game for Big Business.

Emanuel knows this because he was often the Big Government hand helping out Big Business with a big heaping of regulation.

Here are four examples, off the top of my head, of the thing Emanuel says never happens — limiting myself to only those where Emanuel had a front-row seat.

1. Philip Morris lobbied for federal regulation of tobacco. Rahm was White House chief of staff when then-President Barack Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, also known as the Marlboro Monopoly Act. Philip Morris supported the bill even before Obama came into office.
2. Walmart supported the employer mandate. Early in the Obama administration, Walmart came out in support of forcing all employers to provide health insurance — a measure that would obviously crush their smaller competitors and was central to Obamacare. Again, Emanuel was chief of staff at this time.
3. Hospitals supported the Obamacare regulations on providers. Have you noticed a massive consolidation of healthcare providers in the past decade or so? That was an explicit goal of Obamacare. Rahm knows that, and he knows that’s part of why the American Hospital Association supported the bill and fought efforts to repeal it.
4. Rahm got Big Pharma to support Obamacare. Emanuel brought the top lobbyist for the drug industry, Billy Tauzin, into the West Wing of the White House to secure industry support for Obamacare. Then he coordinated with the drug industry to run a series of ads supporting the bill.

WH COORDINATED WITH DRUG-INDUSTRY FRONT GROUP

I could probably come up with other examples involving Emanuel, and I could come up with a dozen more examples not involving him.

Some folks assume that Big Business always wants to be left alone, because they don’t know any better. Emanuel isn’t one of them. He’s obviously lying.