Wayne Crews is a regulatory-policy scholar who appears in The Bob Zadek Show not as an interview subject but as an authority cited by guests and by the host. Across three episodes, Crews is credited with two coinages — “regulatory dark matter” and “flash policy” — and with co-authoring a critique of antitrust enforcement. The excerpts do not establish his title, his employer, or any biographical detail beyond these attributions.
”Regulatory dark matter”
In the January 7, 2017 episode, guest Sam Batkins of the American Action Forum credits Crews with the phrase “regulatory dark matter” as a name for sub-regulatory guidance A Lame Duck’s Last Stand (2017). Batkins says Crews studies regulation, and that sub-regulatory guidance has been referred to by him as regulatory dark matter. Batkins describes the forms such guidance can take — a tweet, a “Dear Colleague” letter, an angry letter to a for-profit university or school warning that funding might be cut if it does not do X, Y, and Z — and notes that it does not go through the same procedures as major rules: no White House interagency review, no opportunity for public comment.
Batkins illustrates the practice with enforcement of the Affordable Care Act, where officials would say they were going to delay the employer mandate without taking public comment, without following the Administrative Procedure Act, and instead through a memo posted online at 11:00 before the July 4th holiday. Bob Zadek frames the stakes: a person in a regulated activity who receives a letter or a tweet from a regulator tends to pay attention because the regulator has a finger on the jugular vein, so these “Dear Colleague” letters almost have the force of law and are taken seriously although there is no control over them.
The episode’s larger context is the regulatory state and what Zadek calls the somewhat rosy prospects for the next four years insofar as burdensome regulations are concerned. Batkins contrasts sub-regulatory guidance with major rules under Dodd-Frank or the Affordable Care Act, which are evident and sometimes get press hits. The Crews phrase supplies the episode’s label for the invisible layer of policy that bypasses notice-and-comment.
Antitrust and “The Terrible Ten”
In the August 21, 2019 episode on antitrust, Zadek introduces guest Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and notes that Young has authored with Wayne Crews a piece titled “The Terrible Ten of Antitrust Policies,” described as the case against antitrust regulation Antitrust 101 with Ryan Young (2019). The citation establishes the collaboration and the title; the excerpts do not reproduce the piece’s arguments or say which policies it lists.
Young’s own testimony in the episode traces major antitrust cases. He argues it is impossible to make the case that antitrust enforcement has improved the marketplace. The Standard Oil case, he says, centered on a company that was continually cutting prices and increasing supply, making its product more available and cheaper; while the case went on, the electric light displaced the gas lamp, killing the kerosene-lamp market that had made Standard Oil’s name, and then the automobile created rising demand for gasoline, so the company had to adapt to consumers rather than the other way around. He calls that case a waste of time. The IBM case of the 1960s lasted about 13 years, by which time the government dropped it because the technological issue had become obsolete. The Microsoft case of the late 1990s was mainly over the inclusion of a free browser in Windows; Internet Explorer was later supplanted by Chrome, Netscape and Firefox, which can be downloaded for free using Microsoft’s own browser, and the case ended in a settlement that was neither victory nor defeat.
Asked by Zadek about AT&T and Bell Labs, Young answers that Bell Labs and AT&T were a government-supported monopoly, the only kind of monopoly that can endure. The government was right to break it up, he says, but wrong to have protected and preserved that monopoly in the first place — righting a wrong rather than affirmatively protecting consumer welfare. Zadek’s framing of the episode is that antitrust is a federal statute purporting to be economic in nature, protecting the free market from a thumb on the scales and protecting the freedom of the marketplace from monopolistic practices without defining that, and that it has again become politically prominent and will be a tool used by those who seek to attack the free market capitalist system.
”Flash policy”
In the August 5, 2020 episode, Young credits Crews with coining the term “flash policy,” which Young calls a beauty and says he has been using a lot too Reversing the Ratchet (2020). Young defines it as policy made during a crisis in great haste with little thought, as quickly as possible, enacted when people are scared. He gives as examples the Patriot Act, passed after 9/11 in, he believes, three days or maybe a week — a classic flash policy that gave the country the Department of Homeland Security as we know it today, with the NSA and the TSA, and two wars still ongoing at least to some degree. He adds the stimulus bills and the Dodd-Frank financial act from the 2008 financial crisis, and, when Zadek supplies the word, TARP. At the time of the episode, Young says, there had been three bailouts or stimulus bills, with a fourth being negotiated and enacted via executive order, which he calls further centralization of government.
Zadek proposes extending the concept to the New Deal: the flash was over years, he says, but it had the same attributes — people were scared, they wanted government to do something, and the government took advantage of the clamoring to reorder government dramatically while nobody objected. Young agrees it is not a stretch but assigns much of the blame to Herbert Hoover, whose administration from 1928 to 1932 covered the first three years of the Depression. Hoover doubled federal spending in real terms, Young says — deflation made the dollar amounts look smaller, but adjusted for inflation he doubled the size of government in four years — and signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill in 1930, which raised tariffs to some of the highest levels in American history and instantly decreased exports by 15%, with longer-lasting effects that shut down foreign commerce and made the Depression worse. Franklin Roosevelt campaigned against that Hoover-style flash policy, promising a calmer, more restrained approach, but once elected saw that people wanted flash policy and took the same approach. Young notes that some New Deal policies contradicted each other — price controls that made food more expensive alongside price breaks for consumers and subsidies to pay the higher prices — and characterizes the period as throwing spaghetti at a wall out of flash policy fear, with most of it not sticking and with long-running institutional changes toward greater centralization and executive power.
The episode’s broader argument, developed by Zadek and Young, concerns what Zadek calls mistake leverage: a mistake made by government profoundly affects tens of millions of people, as with the lockdown, whereas a mistake made by an individual harms himself and perhaps those in his immediate sphere. Young’s formulation is that one of the most important lessons of designing a good government is to limit the amount of damage that one individual can do, and that this lesson is being ignored as presidential authority has grown over many decades. Zadek adds that Congress benefits from delegating: it can pass a statute saying the water must be pure and the air must be clean, assign authority to the EPA, and direct the heat to unelected regulators while claiming credit for the goal. Young closes by urging that people look not just at getting rid of this or that harmful regulation but at the system that makes such rules possible and continues to generate them.
Across episodes
Crews appears in these excerpts only through other people’s attributions, and the treatment does not develop across the three episodes: in 2017 Sam Batkins credits him with “regulatory dark matter” for sub-regulatory guidance; in 2019 Bob Zadek names his co-authorship with Ryan Young of “The Terrible Ten of Antitrust Policies”; in 2020 Ryan Young credits him with coining “flash policy.” Each reference is a single, self-contained attribution rather than a position argued and then revisited.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Crews’s title, employer, educational background, or any publication other than the co-authored antitrust piece. They do not establish whether he ever appeared as a guest on the show, and none of his own words are quoted. The content of “The Terrible Ten of Antitrust Policies” is not described beyond Zadek’s characterization of it as the case against antitrust regulation. No date is given for when Crews coined either phrase, and the excerpts do not say whether he endorses or disputes any use to which his terms are put.