Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, there has been a way many speak about the rules of national and local government. People will speak of the catch-all of regulations with almost a sneer, as if these attempts to hold one another accountable is a fundamental problem, when it is often the thing that keeps your neighbor from dumping toxic chemicals into your yard.
In recent months, the conversation has shifted toward Abundance, the idea Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson define in a book with the same name. Abundance, naturally, is the sense of plenty. This is intended to contrast with scarcity; the mindset that fuels austerity.
For the US, images abundance bring to mind are our most profound: the New Deal, putting a man on the moon, finally achieving civil rights. Scarcity has brought us obsession with tax policy, empty store fronts, and neverending “culture war” issues. In other words, when we treat our environment like there is enough, we can do great things. And the opposite means we never will.
The bigger talking point in Abundance discourse, however, has been around regulations. Specifically, how we talk about them.
A regulation is literally just a rule.
A law. It’s purpose is to keep everything going fairly.
The problem is what we imply by the word regulation. We often imply that a regulation is “burdensome” or that there are always “too many” of them. These are neither objective nor consistent truths. In essence, the word carries a far more negative tone than it has earned.
We also tangle up our thoughts about the wider legal system and the development of legal code. This is natural, since the law is what we’re talking about here. But these are often related concepts rather than the most representative challenge.
We so often hear about the small business owner with no employees struggling to keep up with all of the hardships. But most talk of regulations in news stories revolves around massive corporations wanting to shave costs. We’re talking politics at the state and federal level while thinking of our neighbor punching numbers in a manual counting machine.
The word regulation has baggage. And most of that baggage is preventing us from seeing the central problem.
A regulation is a rule. People and systems interact with the rules. And nine out of ten times, when we blame “regulations” it is because a person or a system is preventing us from doing something.
In other words, it isn’t the law, the regulation, that is the direct problem. It’s the person or the system.
People are often the problem.
Consider the U.S. Supreme Court. A half century ago, it declared a constitutional right to abortion. Then it declared there wasn’t one. The law didn’t change. The members of the court changed. Then the mind of the court changed. Then the interpretation changed.
It isn’t the law, it’s the people.
This isn’t to say there aren’t bad laws. Oh, there are plenty of those. Poorly constructed or vaguely worded laws provide an undue burden on the courts and the people tasked with understanding their purpose. But that isn’t “regulation” in general. And more often than not, it has been user error that does the most harm.
This is why the seemingly mundane derision of regulations is problematic. It draws us away from the problem. That more often than not, it isn’t the laws themselves, its the way people use them.
Regulations and Speed
In an interview with The New Republic, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear suggests that “the Democrats need to admit that there are times when we are over-regulated, and we’ve created so many rules that some programs that we believe are essential for the American people simply take too long.” He uses for his example the long-delayed Internet for All program.
Given the vaguely sinister normality of vilifying the regulatory process and how free we are to respond with the suggestion that we only ever strip away laws which protect us, it’s easy to believe our problem of speed is merely the friction of regulations — and not regulators or systems of regulating. That it is the laws themselves and not people. And certainly not people who intentionally gum up the works.
When asked about what regulations should be waved, Beshear said this:
“What we’ve seen in Kentucky is even a permitting process doesn’t have to be adversarial. If you were talking to the companies and groups that you’re working with, we get most of our factories up and running three to six months faster than most states, and we abide by every environmental and workplace safety rule. What we do is work with and communicate with groups that are doing these projects. They know the expectations. If there are ways to find a solution, move something one direction or another, you impact fewer streams, you invoke fewer rules.” [emphasis mine]
Not only does he not name a regulation, he describes a process that doesn’t change them. A process that, in fact, meets all of them more efficiently than anywhere else. This isn’t about regulations. What he describes instead is a way of making government more efficient by shaping the system itself.
The system is the issue.
Beshear is an effective governor because he is better at making things happen. He is connecting people, agencies, local governments, industries, and making things go.
Now notice where he goes with this:
“In the Internet for All, it wasn’t that they were going to provide the money, set the rules, and then audit us to make sure that we followed them. It was that we had developed every piece of a plan we had to contract and subcontract before we could even submit the plan to potentially be approved. It was set up as a multiyear process before the construction ever started. And again, it was meant to be transformational. But if you want to actually transform in a way that helps people’s everyday lives, you’ve got to be a little bit impatient.”
None of this is that bogeyman called Regulations! It is a mindset that pervades much of DC and our state capitals that we attach strings to money. And to get the money, we need to do a thousand things first to prove we’re worthy.
Having spent over three decades of direct involvement with the nonprofit sector, I will tell you that the whole industry is built this same way, with these same prejudices, inefficiencies, and overt skepticisms built into every single part of the process. One must prove one is worth the handout. That one is sufficiently poor and suitably talented. We were constantly asked to raise more money with fewer resources each year to receive less grant money from each source. My rural volunteer organization in northern Michigan had to compete at scale with the same organization’s Detroit branch.
This isn’t law. It’s how we choose to run things. We can choose to do things differently.
The Neutrality Obstacle
Beshear finishes his response to the question of regulations by stating:
“You’ve got to understand that people are hurting now and need help now. But if it takes five years to put a program in place, you may have lost an entire generation that needed that help, that needed that assistance, or that deserves that infrastructure.”
What Beshear spells out is not a regulation problem, but a systemic one. And the reason we have a systemic problem is that we intentionally and unintentionally use neutrality to block progress. In a literal sense, a non-vote is the same as a no vote on the floor.
The same takes place in our complicity with the demonization of the regulatory state — particularly accepting the assumption that regulations unnecessarily slow down the process. This obscures the human element. It isn’t that zoning laws are bad or that environmental studies are bad. Our problem is that we are willing to blame regulations rather than fix our relationships.
Our problem is that we are willing to blame regulations rather than fix our relationships.
And it is that false neutrality that prevents us from connecting, allowing everyone to blame “the system” for being inefficient. But it isn’t actually the system we’re blaming, let alone reforming.
the anti-regulatory stance seeks to remove the laws without changing the systems. It therefore doesn’t attempt to increase efficiency within the system. It merely takes cops off the beat.
Beshear outlines the reform.
The irony of this interview is that Andy Beshear offers the right solution to the presenting problem. He just stuck it in the wrong package. And, while many believe it is a necessary package, he would get significantly further if he actually said Regulations aren’t the problem, our relationships are. We need to distribute funds smarter and faster, and to build smarter and faster.
After five decades of demonizing the regulations that protect our water, homes, food, cars, schools, public spaces, national parks, toys, retirement accounts, 401Ks, etc., we’ve gotta start talking like these are the benefits we know them to be.
This doesn’t mean we don’t take the NIMBY (not in my backyard) problem seriously. But it is to refuse to center our response on the regulations and away from the people and systems which govern them. Too much of the reform in the neoliberal era and our present reformation has obscured the role of politicians who have legislated for inefficiency with a deregulatory mindset and defended the incredible influence of monopolistic corporations.
What Klein, Thompson, and Beshear all get right is that our mindset needs to shift and our work needs to center on the needs of our communities. We need to be able to move faster and produce. In this way, abundance is absolutely right.
These same leaders need to recognize that the language of deregulation undercuts the message, blurring it’s purpose. We aren’t at war with legal standards that are generally pretty easy to maintain. The regulation isn’t the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is the bureaucracy.
And when we center our minds on that, we can see what most gets in the way of progress tends to be ourselves and one another. In other words, the whole side of the conversation we refuse to talk about.