This article in Slate.com about Trump undermining regulations that were enacted to help people against predatory behavior of financiers caused me to think of this Lincoln parable:
"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty....Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty."
The philosopher Isiah Berlin is said to have summarized the parable as "Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep."
Hence, for those who automatically think cutting regulations is a good thing, well, think again. If we do not do the hard thinking of why particular regulations were enacted or exist in a given area, then we may as well call ourselves a walking bumper sticker. It is why I have such little respect for those who operate from broad minded principles, and why I have such little respect for libertarians in general, as they operate on Kantian principles of philosophy that something cannot be true if it is not always true. Public policy is different. Public policy is about tinkering, thinking about different situations and conditions, and recognizing there is no universal truth in particular situations and conditions.
People figure out ways around regulations, to be sure. Regulatory bodies are often captured by the interests they are supposed to regulate. But that leads to my second equal point which is to avoid putting people into office who represent those interests, or who think those interests know best over regulators. It would be like putting Greenpeace activists in charge of ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil has to have its own interests to at least a reasonable extent to promote oil and gas drilling and refining. The government, however, must have a broader interest and must act as a countervailing force when ExxonMobil's interests harm the environment or indeed the planet.
