With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump.
It’s the part of the government that regulates things like business that used to be regulated by private entities like trade associations and guilds. When congress established regulators for banks and for food and drugs and environmental policy, the private associations that used to regulate those things didn’t like it much- they saw it as a usurping of their domains. When today’s right talk mad about the ‘administrative state’, they’re telling you they want to hand regulatory authority over banking right back to the banks, environmental decision-making to the people who will save money by dumping pollution in the drinking water, etc.
This is a long and well-sourced primer on the history of the democratizing of regulatory authority in the modern democratic state, one that also discusses the rapid reversal of that trend we’re seeing today
Thanks for sharing that prospect.org link, I wish this could be turned into a made for TV series on YouTube, presented by Mr. Beast, Mark Rober en Tyler Hoover.
I would pay money to see that done!
The subject is really not talked about in our schooling well enough; we hear a lot about how throwing off a monarchy meant we now have a legislature and a president, but the transition from colony-under-king to republic carried the judiciary forward as a largely feudal institution.
Under feudal/colonial rule, it used to be trade associations or guilds that would write rules to govern business conduct, but those typically required signoff from the local Lord/Governor’s son (or deputy) to be enforceable- the switch to a republic meant there really wasn’t an analogous executive signoff so it’s not surprising that American corporate power would eventually forge private administrative authority into a sort of sovereign/antidemocratic right to rule their spheres… right up to the point that state and federal governments decided to impose regulation on them.
This conflict, between advocates of private vs public administrative rule, is one of the central threads of the conflict between today’s oligarchy and American democracy and it gets far less attention than it deserves.
Thanks! It sounds like they’re coming up with stupid terms to create boogeymen and scapegoats so that their gullible followers would start hating them.
These developments have been described in mainstream policy discourse as “deregulation” and “privatization,” but those terms are misleading. The term “deregulation” suggests a reversion to a pre-existing system of nonregulation, a realm in which state authority is absent. But this is a fantasy. There is no pre-legal, law-free realm. There is always regulation, albeit sometimes invisible and private, and hence unaccountable.
I really liked this part of the article you shared because it points out their strategy of coming up with euphemisms that are straight lies. They’re not de-regulating. They’re changing authority over regulation from somewhat democratic bodies to privates ones.
It sounds like they’re coming up with stupid terms to create boogeymen and scapegoats
That’s exactly what they’re doing. It amounts to putting a misleading label on the thing and telling people what the label means instead of what the underlying substance is. Rhetorically speaking, it’s 3-card monte and it annoys me so much
It’s the part of the government that regulates things like business that used to be regulated by private entities like trade associations and guilds. When congress established regulators for banks and for food and drugs and environmental policy, the private associations that used to regulate those things didn’t like it much- they saw it as a usurping of their domains. When today’s right talk mad about the ‘administrative state’, they’re telling you they want to hand regulatory authority over banking right back to the banks, environmental decision-making to the people who will save money by dumping pollution in the drinking water, etc.
This is a long and well-sourced primer on the history of the democratizing of regulatory authority in the modern democratic state, one that also discusses the rapid reversal of that trend we’re seeing today
Thanks for sharing that prospect.org link, I wish this could be turned into a made for TV series on YouTube, presented by Mr. Beast, Mark Rober en Tyler Hoover.
I would pay money to see that done! The subject is really not talked about in our schooling well enough; we hear a lot about how throwing off a monarchy meant we now have a legislature and a president, but the transition from colony-under-king to republic carried the judiciary forward as a largely feudal institution.
Under feudal/colonial rule, it used to be trade associations or guilds that would write rules to govern business conduct, but those typically required signoff from the local Lord/Governor’s son (or deputy) to be enforceable- the switch to a republic meant there really wasn’t an analogous executive signoff so it’s not surprising that American corporate power would eventually forge private administrative authority into a sort of sovereign/antidemocratic right to rule their spheres… right up to the point that state and federal governments decided to impose regulation on them.
This conflict, between advocates of private vs public administrative rule, is one of the central threads of the conflict between today’s oligarchy and American democracy and it gets far less attention than it deserves.
Thanks! It sounds like they’re coming up with stupid terms to create boogeymen and scapegoats so that their gullible followers would start hating them.
I really liked this part of the article you shared because it points out their strategy of coming up with euphemisms that are straight lies. They’re not de-regulating. They’re changing authority over regulation from somewhat democratic bodies to privates ones.
That’s exactly what they’re doing. It amounts to putting a misleading label on the thing and telling people what the label means instead of what the underlying substance is. Rhetorically speaking, it’s 3-card monte and it annoys me so much