Ajit Pai Quotes

Legislation must be passed which undoes the damage caused by excessive de-regulation. That means reinstalling the regulatory firewalls that were ripped down in 1999.

If we want our regulators to do better, we have to embrace a simple idea: regulation isn't an obstacle to thriving free markets; it's a vital part of them.

What a nightmare it would be if we individually had to criminalise every single abuse of every single commodity, market or financial product. There are thousands of these and new ones being invented every day. Such an approach would have disastrous implications for regulation and policy-making. Any slide towards it must be resisted.

Nobody wants to be against technology, but I think that regulators should not - and people should not - assume that faster is always better in markets.

The Federal Reserve has always recognized the importance of allowing markets to work, and government oversight of financial firms will never be fully effective without the aid of strong market discipline.

I've spent enough time in the business community to know there are certain regulators who are very constructive in their approach - those who enforce the laws and who actually want to help you comply - and there are others who have a prosecutorial attitude.

As someone with a deep faith in competition and the market, I also know that markets only work with tough enforcement of the rules that guarantee competition and fair play - and that the pressure to break those rules only gets stronger as the amount of money involved gets larger.

The Federal Trade Commission is not an enforcement agency.

We're charged by Congress with regulating financial institutions. We take that mission seriously. We are tough supervisors and regulators.

A regulator is supposed to create and enforce a standard.

The government has a key role in regulating and making sure there's an even playing field and protecting consumers. No question about it.

While control is needed, and perfectly warranted, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection.

I've always been a ... believer in good regulation.

An effective regulatory system today would be one guided by a few basic premises that can be applied flexibly but also universally.

The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something.

Many advantages … may be gained through the establishment of trade commissions, national and state. At first, we should be conservative in giving additional powers to these commissions. The powers given should be based upon the same principles that have been applied in the pure-food laws, and in the control of the public utilities. The American people always move slowly in these matters, and step by step. I should not expect that these trade commissions, if created, would at once be granted all the powers which they would finally exercise. In this matter I should expect the same slow development to take place that has occurred regarding the commissions which control the public utilities.

Regulators are very heavily lobbied and they tend to give in…. We must have strong, vigilant, regulators.

In the past few months, as a result of our action, we have demanded of many citizens that they surrender certain licenses to do as they please in their business relationships; but we have asked this in exchange for the protection which the state can give against exploitation by their fellow men or by combinations of their fellow men.

Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.

The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum and for determining the “rules of the game”.

The first is determining how to deal with the great industrial combinations is knowledge of the facts—publicity.

The last 6 months make it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work.

It satisfies the public clamor for a government supervision of the railroads at the same time that the supervision is almost entirely nominal.

The basic architecture of Dodd-Frank makes sense. At the same time, as a number of regulators and legislators have observed, the act was a complex effort that produced thousands of pages of rules.

Trade deals are not the vehicle for raising or lowering standards of protection for consumers, the environment, workers or anyone else. Regulations are made by governments and parliaments.