I've tried not to get too political in the blog, but to hell with that. One thing that really keeps this country back, I think, is the way we think about regulations.
This came up recently when I read a blog post by Bill Maher, who noted that the horrible fertilizer explosion in West, Texas, is a direct result of a flagrant disregard for regulations. To quote Maher's blog:
"And now it turns out that the plant was storing 1,350 times the ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger government oversight. When a plant stores 400 pounds of the stuff, they need to let the DHS know. This place was storing 270 tons." http://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/real-time-with-bill-maher-blog/2013/4/29/culture-matters-1.html
Maher is right about this, but somehow he later concludes that "We don't need more regulations in the wake of Waco. I'm not even sure we need more enforcement. We need a culture that respects our laws – even the ones written by Democrats."
Set aside the starry-eyed notion that we can just somehow magically "change the culture" to make people obey rules, without actually enforcing them. Such blanket statements about regulations, as if they're all a single monolith, is a terrible and harmful way to look at them. It's so oversimplified as to be meaningless. In some areas, we might need more regulations. In others, we might need less. Saying we don't need more regulations is like saying we don't need more laws.
Realize that the category of "regulations" includes everything from how much ammonium nitrate you can store in one place to food safety to housing codes to banking regulations to environmental protection. They're all very different. To discover whether a single regulation is necessary, you have to evaluate in a careful cost-benefit analysis, researching both the good and the bad that results from it.
That sounds very boring and time-consuming, of course, but there are no shortcuts here. Slashing those big bad "regulations" as if they're all just one big thing invariably means taken a hatchet to a lot of important rules. You can't really know whether we need more or fewer regulations until you find out exactly what positives and negatives result from each one.
Obama has launched a program to do exactly this. He took feedback from ordinary folk and found hundreds of regulations that were outdated and wrong. His favorite example was that milk was being regulated as if it were a toxic substance. This is the right approach: Don't go in assuming we need more or fewer regulations, because you don't really know. Instead, find individual ones that don't make sense and get rid of them -- meanwhile, enact ones in banking and health care that will help people and prevent future disasters. It's a constant process of pruning and building, always with an eye towards making things better, just like all lawmaking is.
Granted, regulations are a unique kind of law. They're not like criminal laws, which come into play after you do something wrong. Instead they prevent you from accidentally doing something wrong. They're a lot more like traffic laws.
Regulations are basically just traffic laws for businesses. Each regulation is like a stop sign. You might find an individual stop sign that doesn't help anything and campaign to get it removed. Or you might find an intersection that needs a stop sign. But saying that we should just slash the number of stop signs, without looking at the validity of each one, is going to result in the loss of a lot of lives.
Take an axe indiscriminately to either traffic laws or regulations and we might move around faster, sure. But we'd also have a lot more accidents. That will likely make the faster speed not worth the cost.
The Great Recession is a great example. Lots of rules for the financial industry have been cut since the Reagan years. It resulted in a few temporary gains here and there, almost entirely for the very rich. Eventually we ended up with a massive, lawless "shadow banking system" of unregulated investments like credit default swaps and collatoralized debt obligations. When this system collapsed because of the drop in house prices, it took the world's finances with it. The benefits of all those cut regulations (not to mention the many that weren't passed because we weren't keeping up) turned out to not be worth the cost. This oversimplified anti-regulation attitude thus caused terrible suffering.
Regulations as a whole get a bad name because we don't realize what they're preventing. We forget about the problems that existed before the regulations came into play and we only see the down side, of having to fill out more paperwork or wait for government approval or whatever else. It's just too easy to forget the terrible tragedies of the past and then take for granted that such tragedies can't happen.
Another example is in order. Before food safety regulations, people died by the tens of thousands every year from tainted food. There was a recent local story about a dairy farmer selling unpasteurized milk. He was spouting the typical "Get the government out of my business" crap about why he should be allowed to do this. Then a lot of his customers got violently ill.
This is why we have regulations. If they solve problems, then many years later, people forget the problems existed. Then they think we don't need the rules. Sometimes they might be right. More often, they're wrong. To find out which is which, it takes a lot of careful work, and some amount of experimentation. It does not take simple-minded presumptions about needing more or fewer regulations.
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