Compensation for Regulatory Takings with a Redistributive Government

Richard Epstein has argued that governments should pay compensation for regulatory actions that impose costs on a subset of society. I develop a model in which there are two groups, one of whom benefits from a regulation, and one of whom bears the costs. A potentially biased government sets the level of the regulation and also redistributes income across the two social groups via the tax system. When taxes are nondistortionary, the government chooses the efficient level of the regulation to maximize wealth and then uses the tax system to distribute this wealth according to its preferences. If the government is forced to pay compensation for the costs of the regulation, it simply undoes this via the tax and transfer system. When taxes are distortionary, societal wealth is monotonically decreasing in the degree of compensation to be paid, so that the optimal level of compensation is zero.