TRUCKING DEREGULATION : EVOLUTION OF A NEW POWER STRUCTURE
The policy change that nearly everyone refers to as deregulation is in fact, of course, a type of reregulation. That is, it is the process of replacing one set of rules governing economic behavior with another. Specifically, the currently popular tendency is to replace the "explicit" regulation imposed by statutorily established economic authorities with the "implicit" regulation of the market system itself.' One expects the change in the rules of behavior to result in a change in the outcome-for better or worse depending on one's view of the economic system, of the role of the larger matrix of implicit and explicit regulation, and of the effect of key factors such as technology and resource constraints. Deregulation enthusiasts have been proclaiming the success of their policies in many sectors recently, among them interstate trucking. For example, Elizabeth Bailey cites evidence that productivity has risen and that costs and prices have fallen.2 Thomas Gale Moore also shows lower freight rates, and lower returns to trucking firms as well.3 Judy Wang Chiang and Ann Friedlander claim that the technology of trucking offers little in the way of economies of scale, and that many small suppliers can thus successfully compete.4 In sum, these and other supporters of deregulation have concluded that the trucking industry suffi-