ABSTRACT
Deregulation had touched a responsive cord with constituencies stretching across the political spectrum and that it might offer lots of people in Washington a chance to make their marks on history. Until about 1950, criticism of the regulatory regime was almost exclusively a province of the legal profession, and it was concerned mostly with the procedural rules of fairness. During the 1950s a new pattern of behavioral analysis emerged, and it led to criticisms of regulation right across the board, that is, from one social science perspective after another. In the late 1950s, the economists entered the debate, led most notably by transportation analyses done by John Meyer, Merton Peck, and others. They contended that, with the growth of new transportation modes in the twentieth century, the transportation industries had become increasingly competitive and that the railroads' economic power no longer was a real source of monopoly or oligopolistic power.
