Reagan in Reason

Discriminatory, persecutorial nonsense from Florida's Attorney General James Uthmeier made me think of an old adage from Ronald Reagan;

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

Prompted by the thought, I looked for the source of the quote, which lead me to a 1975 interview with then, Governor Reagan by Manuel Klausner, published in libertarian Reason Magazine.

In addition to condemning a "Nanny State" -- pretty much what the Republicans have been building nationally, Ron DeSantis in particular -- and giving a real shocker of a flashback regarding the cost of college tuition, the future President spoke about the need for some regulation, including a need for targeted regulatory hindrance to slow business.

Once, at the beginning of World War II, I asked the medical officer at our post (it was in New Orleans) why they were closing up the brothels with so many military bases there. And he gave me a pretty hard, cold answer. He said the army isn't interested in morals. The army's interested in keeping soldiers healthy. He showed me the difference in the statistics. He said the average girl in a house handled roughly 40 to 50 customers a night. And he said if you give her a five day week, that's 200 to 250. Suppose the first man infects her and here are 200 to 249 men that follow suit during that week and he said the most often that you could possibly inspect would be once a week. He said we also know statistically that by putting a girl out on a street because of the difficulty of soliciting and getting to a place and getting back out on the street again, they only handle about 9 customers. Now, he said, the first thing that's done when they're picked up is inspection. So every 10 days she averages inspection-and there's only been 90 customers in between. Now, you stop to think of the public health situation of this. You have to, then, take on certain regulatory chores if you're going to have this.

The Trump administration has moved far from what Reagan prescribed.

Executive Order 14192 signed on January 31, 2025, set forth that for every new regulation issued, ten existing regulations must be eliminated. The economic cost of the new regulation must be offset by the savings from the ten eliminated.

Additionally, the EO also orders for the heads of federal agencies to eliminate ten regulations before September 30th, 2025. They are to use the criteria defined by OMB Memo M-25-20.

The deregulatory scheme is designed to "significantly reduce the private expenditures required to comply with Federal regulations to secure America's economic prosperity”. The administration’s goal are compliance costs to industry of "less than zero”. It is to unabashedly benefit business.

Last I heard, most businesses are not hurting and those whose fortunes that may be at risk can usually blame the uncertainty this administration has caused over the past seven months.

This goes from the big box stores who don't know what to expect from tariffs or how the inevitable inflationary price increases will affect consumer spending; to the manufacturers unable to predict their product costs; to the laboratories who have lost funding; to the vacation destinations worried about the loss of international travelers, reluctant spenders and the threats to their labor pool; farmers; home remodeling; big ticket items. Even the businesses in the country’s college towns, which are usually somewhat protected from economic downturns because there is always another batch of incoming students, don’t really know how many foreign students will be coming and while some may express confidence in the President, there is also uncertainty from the administration’s war on colleges, its blackout on university-based scientific research and the changes to the student loan system.

”Drill, baby, drill”, the relaxation of mining and pollution regulations, lax worker safety or the ability to build a strip mall or golf course with limited environmental oversight are not going to help any of the businesses listed and again, last I looked, none of the businesses who would benefit from these types of changes aren’t hurting. By and large, they are doing just fine.

Our current regulatory structure is the compromise we have reached from 119 congresses, 47 presidents and 235 years of the federal judiciary.

Of course, there is always room for improvement in pretty much everything – President Trump added two flags to the White House lawn because he felt they were needed – but there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater and willy-nilly cut the regulations our political process have achieved. While it may be to business' monetary advantage to operate without oversight, it is a danger to society for anyone to service 40 to 50 johns a night.

When the interviewer asked if the free market could adequately act in a protectionist role in the absence of regulations, Governor Reagan replied:

Maybe what we should look at are those areas where government should be a "Big Brother" in ensuring that the private sector is doing the job. In other words, suppose the whole food industry would police itself. Then I think government would have a legitimate place in keeping a watchful eye on them to make sure that industry did not gradually, for profit, erode the standards. This I think could hold true with a great many other things.

You can’t protect society with a ten for one sale.

Regulatory reform requires an intelligent approach.