| Mr Khan said: The other difference is that i hold onto the idea that things can be fixed. Government can be slim and efficacious (similar to the New Democrats' mantra from the 90s). Regulations need to be streamlined without actually being defanged; a leaner, meaner government that's only there to stop public bads from accumulating due to personal actions, and not actually play favorites with various industries or interfere in folks' personal lives (except where their personal lives are outwardly harmful). Modernization is always going to be chaotic, but you never really see the benefits of modernization spread until the regulatory body steps in, like in America, where the gilded age of the late 19th century was followed by the universal prosperity of the 20th with the help of a growing regulatory docket. Obviously overreaction is going to be counter-productive (to speak nothing of the inherent systemic flaws of outright Communism), but reaction needs to be there. Free markets will always be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous, leading to widespread misery. |
That's an awful lot of faith in something that has never happened and will never happen due to the perverse incentives that drive government to relentlessly expand itself. No regulatory agency (or any other department) is ever going to voluntarily downsize because if you're the head of that agency, you don't make your career by making your agency less important. So if allowing corporations any sort of political voice or legal redress is this absurdly controversial, where does the impetus come from to ever streamline the regulatory environment?
Governments will always be wasteful, they will always play favorites, and they will always interfere with personal lives because the entire scheme is predicated on coercion. The apparently terrifying free market is not. Expecting the former to protect you from the latter seems incredibly backwards.
