The Humiliation of Regulation
by Ted Bucklin
Posted on 2007-06-28 14:03:00
Going back to Ronald Reagan, the first chief executive to trash the entire enterprise of government, the term “government regulation” has acquired a strong aversive power. We no longer question the meaning of it, we simply cringe with distaste at its mention. And if there were a single concept that governs the contemporary conservative mind, it would have to be aversion to regulation. Sadly, much of the American public has bought into the utterly immature notion that no one should have to submit to the humiliation of regulation, America is about is freedom (from regulation).
The sheer mindless idiocy of this aversion to regulation has yet to be examined seriously in public. Yet government is entirely about regulation, and the determination of which regulations yield the most benefit for the most people is the most basic democratic function. Aversion to regulation is equivalent to aversion to government, and conservative antipathy toward both regulation and government has climaxed with the current nightmare (for representative democracy) of the Bush Administration. And it’s not just Bush, but his legions of doctrinaire fools in office throughout the federal bureaucracy who think regulation is a curse.
It is a human tendency to highlight aversive consequences of governance (ie taxes, speed limits, costly environmental regs, tort laws) while downplaying the benefits that directly and indirectly accrue from submitting to governance (such as moderately functional institutions of society that are created, financed and run under government regulations incorporating certain societal values such as fairness, safety, openness, uniformity and dependability into policy). Ronald Reagan and his conservative heirs have made a political movement out of denigrating government, promoting a childish fantasy that freedom means we don’t have to worry about anyone else. Meanwhile they have eviscerated the ideal of the common good while sucking dry the institutional reservoirs, from EPA to SSA, that have been slowly filled over generations and maintained in the public interest.
I see regulation as a personal civic responsibility. As a concerned and participating citizen of our democracy, it is my civic duty to regulate my behaviors for the common good. I largely abide by laws and regulations in part because I see them as an affirmation of the democratic process. Sure there are some that chap my hide, but does it make sense to trash the entire enterprise of democratic governance because there are some regs I don’t like? As long as regulations are forged in the public interest, I willingly submit to them.
Democracy is a process by which the concerns of all citizens are taken into consideration and hammered into policy, law and regulation. Concern for all is the defining principle of democracy, and regulation is the expression of that concern. Perhaps the day will come when the American public re-evaluates its commitment to the common good and re-engages with the imperfect, often frustrating and ponderously slow process of making good policies and regulations. For now, we seem unconcerned about the changes wrought by the government-hating conservatives who have been busily disabling the instruments of regulation, and in the process directing our institutions away from the principles of democracy.
“Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” - John F. Kennedy
Ted Bucklin is a carpenter, writer, and wild dancing fool who lives not far from Sonoma, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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