The positive side of government regulation
In the past year and a half, I’ve traveled outside of the U.S. seven times, and each time I’ve stepped out of an airport terminal into the air of the city I’m visiting, the first thing that has struck me is the stink of car and truck exhausts. American cities, even huge ones like Los Angeles and New York, smell cleaner and fresher than small cities in other countries, such as Veracruz, Mexico, and Port of Spain, Trinidad. And this is entirely due to action by that favorite whipping boy of conservatives and libertarians, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Perhaps George Bush and his cohorts, including lobbyists from regulation-hating groups like the Cato Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers, have no sense of smell. Or perhaps they wear gas masks whenever they step outside of filtered-air buildings in places like Mexico City or Riyadh.
I smoke (cigarettes) heavily, and I certainly notice the stink. You’d think I would be less able to detect it and that I would be less in favor of pollution regulations than a non-smoking jogger like Bush, but it seems that I am more sensitive to diesel fumes than he is.
We keep hearing about how government regulations hamper American business. Perhaps at some point we need to start asking ourselves the opposite question: Why should we support business (let alone tax corporate profits at a lower rate than a worker’s salary) when so many companies are willing to do us harm if we let them?
The stock answer in today’s political climate is, “The main goal of business is to produce profits, and profitable businesses are the mainstay of the U.S. economy and benefit all of us.”
A statement likely to follow that one is, “Remove regulatory and tax barriers to business success, and everyone in the U.S. will be better off.”
Have we forgotten how bad our smog was before we had EPA emissions regulations? Or how, before we had a Food and Drug Administration, many drugs sold over-the-counter were either addictive or had lethal side effects? Or how American workers were treated before there were wage and hour laws?
The problem with a “trust business, not government” mindset is that the industries we regulate have proved, over and over, that they will do nasty things to their customers and employees to make their owners rich(er), even though those same owners (and their paid industry groups, think tanks, and lobbyists) constantly tell us that regulations are bad.
Some government regulations certainly are bad, and many are enforced in silly ways. But this doesn’t mean the idea of having government make sure business doesn’t profit by harming others is bad.
Some of our nuttier right-wingers seem to believe all government regulations are horrible because some of them are dumb. Okay, let’s look at the other side of the coin. Let’s list all the evils done by private companies. By the time we get half-way through the horrors we see on that list, a whole lot of people will probably want to get a movement going that would close all private businesses and have government take over their functions.
Oh, wait. That’s been tried. It didn’t work out any better than letting business function without regulation, did it?
We need to realize that neither business acting without regulation nor complete government control is the best way to run a dynamic economy. We need to accept the middle way — businesses that are built on profit, but held in check by government regulations that keep them from doing harm to their employees, customers, and neighbors.
Sadly, neither our current crop of business leaders nor the politicians they own seem to think this would be a desirable state of affairs. They keep acting as if all government regulations are, by definition, evil.
I guess they’ve never been anywhere there isn’t an equivalent of our EPA to keep car and truck pollution in check. If they travelled a little more, they might realize that many — even most — of the ways we regulate business make our lives better, not worse, and might start thinking of ways to regulate business activities more sensibly instead of constantly crying that all government actions are bad, bad, bad.