Goverment Regulation

I ran across this this article the other day, which provides a common-sense look at how government regulation is REQUIRED to foster freedom. Now for the record, I believe laws should be kept to a minimum and only instituted when there is an overwhelming case for them. I also know that as a society advances they tend to make more and more laws while eliminating very few of the old laws making the mere task of understanding what we're supposed to do nearly impossible. Don't believe me? Try buying a vacation home, owning your own home, rent out a room or two, start a business, buy and sell a few shares of stock and then do your own taxes.

That said, regulation does have place. The reason I hate the current Republican arguments is because they've become purists. Rather than realizing that the real question is one of balance, they've taken a "drugs is bad" kind of approach in saying that all government intervention is bad (except the military industrial complex of course).

Here's an except in which Bok uses a traffic analogy to make the point:

Normally, the point of driving is to get somewhere. The traffic laws enable us to get where we are going much more quickly and safely than we would if each of us had to decide for him- or herself which side of the street to drive on. The traffic laws do not tell us where to go. They leave the choice of destination, and for that matter the decision whether to drive at all, entirely up to us. They simply tell us which side of the road to drive on, that we should stop at various points, and so forth. By taking away our freedom to drive on the left, or to blast through busy intersections, they grant us much more freedom in the form of a greatly enhanced ability to get wherever we want to go quickly and safely.


Anyone who thinks that the traffic laws enhance our freedom should acknowledge that in some cases, including this one, government action can enhance our freedom, even if that action takes the form of restrictions on what we can and cannot do. An enormous number of questions about which (other) forms of government action might enhance our freedom would remain to be answered, but the fact that some government policy involves either a more active government or new restrictions on our action would not, by itself, imply that it diminishes our freedom.