The Economist ran a comparison of Senator McCain and Senator Obama this week. Senator McCain was damned with faint praise for his ‘orthodox’ supply side deregulation proposals (things the Economist itself is supposed to believe in) and then the magazine (sorry ‘newspaper’) dismissed proposals to deregulate health care and other areas of life with the following statement.
“America is already a pretty deregulated place”.
So the thousands of pages of Federal, State and local regulations that are strangling life in the United States, do not really exist?
And people wonder why I hate the Economist. The writers know nothing about the political economy of the United States – or anywhere else. Ignorance is not fatal if someone understands that they are ignorant (for example, I am ignorant of spelling and grammar) but to be ignorant and to think oneself knowledgeable is a fatal combination.
However, how can the writers of the Economist be anything other than ignorant – when they are the products of modern universities?
I recently heard a Professor of Economics from the University of York on BBC Radio. This person suggested that a good way to reduce inflation (so that the Bank of England could reduce interest rates) would be to take yet more things out of the (already rigged) Consumer Price Index. The Professor was not being ironic – the man really thought he was making a sensible suggestion.
The students of such people go on to be writers for the Economist.
I have to agree that the US is now a fairly deregulated place. It’s simply the nature of the regulation, in the past it was a maddening infiltration of many details, but the prime moving was still the risk holder’s province. Regulation is less, but it is more potent, going directly to the jugular. Also, regulation in the strictest sense is an executive branch function. Now that clearly stated anti-business laws have exploded (the legislative function) and the courts have much more to say on commercial activities, it leaves less for the executive branch to do.
So I wonder how much less this is ignorance than a semantical game. Crafty people use “less regulation” in their arguments to mean the narrower definition knowing full well that overall government interference from all sources is up.
I stopped reading the Economist some years ago due to their miasmic combination of overweening arrogance, anti-Americanism, and socialist “Third Way” advocacy. They’ve gone down the same tube the NYT, Time, and Newsweek have; I wouldn’t accept a free subscription to any of them.
Why do we, what is our purpose, when we read “Opinions?”
Does that differ from what we seek when we read (or listen) for information?
There is some range of difference in the information content of the Economist from that of others of its genre.
The information content presented in the NYT, WaPo, Time, USN&WR, NewsWeek, et simil, is all selected, structured, formatted and regularly misrepresented to support opinion (“policy”) writings. That applies right down to the selection of photo images of personalities.
The Economist’s publishers have moved (and continue to move) to selling “pure” information in other venues of publications and reports. But, by and large, the information that is presented is not consistently distorted to conform to or support opinion.
True, the Economist has gone through alterations over the 40 years I have read and subscribed to it; and it has a different function and different audience target from the days of Bagehot.
Should we expect a commercial venture to be an institution, even when it purports to be?
See, The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843 -1993 by R.D. Edwards
Paul, one slight correction re regulation in the United States. Just the Federal tax code available from the GPO is 16,845 pages. And that is just the law and the regs for Title 26 of the US CFR.
The sum total of the ‘real’ US Federal laws and regs are probably unknowable.
“De”regulation does not suggest that America is largely free of regulation. It suggests rather that America was regulated but was subsequently liberated. But that’s clearly false: even when the federal government “deregulates” is usually does so by adding laws, not removing them.
The political history of America is quite the opposite of what the Economist suggests. Has there been a single period of history where the government (and its regulations) saw steady decline rather than growth? Certainly not any time in the last century.
Daniel, you are so right. Not even at the Constitutional level can the proponents of big government deregulate without creating cascading tiers of bureaucracy.
The 18th Amendment was repealed . . .
by the 21st Amendment. Check out section 2 of the 21st. My understanding is that section 2 of the 21st Amendment opened a new category of Federal reach and is responsible for whole legions of government officialdumb.
I am at a loss to imagine what The Economissed thinks has been deregulated.
My apologies Midwesterner – I should have said “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pages of Federal, State and local regulations”.
And, as has beein pointed out above, it is the vast extent and scope of the powers of government (the way it gets involved in every aspect of life) that is the problem – not the simple number of regulations.
Regardless of whether or not America is regulated, the (supposed) fact that there is not very much doesn’t mean that more would be better, or less would be bad. The implication of “America is already a pretty deregulated placed” as a rejoinder to suggestions of further deregulation is that regulation is basically good, and we can only tolerate a certain amount of its absense before we start having problems. A telling statement indeed.
A few decades ago, I got a subscription to the Economist. They misreported some initiatives I’d been following, something that would have taken gross, incurable incompetence, so I let my subscription lapse.
I think of them as being in the same rank as Slime and Newsreek. But not as bad as the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Oh, the New York Times. The news reporting was biased enough. Then they had an editorial saying how poorly industries that the US government had been subsidizing were doing, and how well the unsubsidized computer industry was doing. Their conclusion? Subsidize the computer industry. All the news that $#!+s they print, then indecorously decorate.
And you wonder how a similarly-well-reasoning Alito can get appointed to the US Supreme Court instead of getting disrobed. The number of competent reporters who aren’t muzzled by their editors must be countable on one hand. (It’d take a miracle for that to require base 3.)
The USA “is already a pretty deregulated place”? It might look that way from Europe but it sure doesn’t look that way to those of us under US regulations. The cost of meeting those regulations now exceeds the direct cost of taxation.
Each summer, I visit a charter school where I try to enroll the teachers in a retirement savings plan called a 403b (named, naturally, after a regulation). Each time I enroll one, I must complete 26 pages of forms including entering the same information multiple times. I have to report each teacher’s name, address, residential and business phone number, Social Security number, age, citizenship, marital status, number of dependents, income, source of income, driver’s license or passport number, risk tolerance, tax bracket, planned holding period, and investment objectives. He must sign the forms in three places and I must update his information every three years.
All this regulation would be worthwhile if it served a useful purpose. Very little of it ever does. Whenever I sell a customer an investment, I am obliged to furnish him a prospectus for it. My company sends him another each year. In dealing with thousands of customers over fifteen years, I have met exactly ONE customer who actually read an investment prospectus.
USA “already a fairly deregulated place”? It might seem that way to the opinionators at “The Economist” but it doesn’t look like it to us who work under this so-called deregulation.
The thread at first seemd to be on the Economist based on what was published as opinion, but digresses to critique of the opinion.
Consider this in thinking through the opinion published:
Most (practically all?) in the U S go through their daily lives oblivious of all the broad ranges of purported “regulations,” ranging from rules of homeowners associations, condo By-laws, city and county ordinances, rulings on trash disposal, zoning restrictions and requirements, etc. Legislatures now dump out more and more wordings of “intents and purposes” to be put into effect by rules, regulations and procedures to be established and executed by bureaucratic authority, so empowered.
But people go on living and doing with little regard to all that #@* unless it directly impacts some part of their daily lives. People here still largely solve their own forms of problems as they perceive them. To that extent, human conduct in the U.S. is largely “unregulated.” That is to say, all the CFR (annotated) has minimal effect how people conduct themselves.
That said, we must accept that the extensive regulations, etc., do have impacts, mostly economic, and much (but certainly not all) of that in the costs of governments and the various kinds of civic organizations (Condos, etc).
People of the U.S are largley “law-abiding.” But actually that “abiding” is what confirms what is Law. They are also largely “regulation-ignoring;” and that ignoring is what (properly) denigrates regulation and legislation.
Its sometime since I attempted to read the Economist, I realised at once that their grasp of economics was worse than mine. I also realised they have a very left wing agenda ( thats probably is explanation enough) So it is no surprise to me that this opinion was supported by the BBC, with its well known pro government take on News and facts that is supportive of the present regime
RRS,
Do not underestimate the effect of the ‘tall nail’ syndrome.
The way I think of it is most Americans live their lives below the height of the mower blades. But as soon as one starts to grow a little taller, their head is in the blades. My moment came when I needed to hire an employee to work part time. I took one stomach clenching, sweaty palmed look at what it would entail to legally hire someone, that I decided to only ever be a sole proprietor. From that point on I turned down jobs that I could not do alone. If that effect is happening to even one in 20 Americans, and I suspect the number is much higher than that, then the consequences to our nation’s economic strength are beyond calculation.