Regulations

Last week Ezra Klein started Worrying about regulations with not much of a conclusion. Some are needed and some are not. A reader wrote in with an example of one that is not.

Kevin Drum followed up on The Problem With Regulations. "To a fair approximation, regulations on corporate behavior can only be enacted when a Democrat is president, so if you want any new regulations at all, they can only occur when a Democrat happens to be in office...The Republican Party these days is basically a ward of its corporate base, and this makes them dedicated to mindlessly declaring all regulations "job killers" and getting rid of everything they can, regardless of whether they're effective or not. That makes it pretty hard to come up with some kind of efficient, bipartisan approach to streamlining the regulatory state."

Again, I think reasonable regulations for safety and transparency reasons are necessary. I think the bigger problem in Washington is this. So much for Federalist Paper #10.