Another problem I see with regulatory approaches to problems, in addition to the ratchet effect where regulation begets more regulation in an unstoppable cascade bringing heat death to society, is that they are so very hard to rescind.

[T]here are many examples of market failure. And maybe you can do things to reduce government failure. But in the end, there is the issue of dynamics. Market failure tends to be self-correcting, because entrepreneurs have incentive to fix things. For government failure to be corrected, somebody needs the insight to know how to correct it and they need to overcome the political opposition to changing the system. In practice, the change does not happen. You cannot get rid of the mohair subsidy.

Regulations not only create a need for more regulation, they are resistant to treatment, like bacteria that laugh off antibiotics, even though they degrade their hosts.

Resorting to regulation is intellectual failure. It reveals a lack of knowledge about systems functions, especially systems dynamics, an inability to reason usefully about complex issues, and an unlovely habit of mind that privileges brute force above finesse. We all do fail intellectually at times, but such behavior should be a last, reluctant resort when the problem is dire and all else has failed, something we do with regret and a resolve to reform when we belatedly comprehend the true issue. Having committed regulation crime, we should continue to work the problem to discover and implement better policies that solve the problem in a less destructive way. And, the secondary and tertiary problems created by the regulatory quick fix need to be cleaned up too.

It's analogous to the effort to revive our intestinal bacterial community after taking an antibiotic. We may have stopped a raging infection, but in the process we have also nuked our symbionts and so will function poorly in future. A better approach, if we had the time and wit to learn to own and operate a human body, would have been to boost immunities, be in rude good health, so that the raging infection raged less in the first place, and less drastic interventions than antibiotics would have sufficed. Easier said than done of course, and we all fail at some point (though I, a grandfather, have not yet required the use of antibiotics), but the goal should be robustness and resistance.

I think it's good to be clear about these things. The desire to be progressive, to improve the lot of humanity, isn't thwarted by true conservatives. They are just cautious progressives that privilege traditions, arguing that they are the result of long trial and error, and should be altered only with caution and due consideration. Progress is thwarted by those who wish to limit humanity, the rules and regulations brigades, and they can be found in all camps, left and right.

If we circle back to Nurse Ratchet and examine the S&N passage with this lens we can see something interesting.

“In America, the political left and political right have conspired to create a culture and politics of victimization, and all the benefits of resentment and cynicism have accrued to the right. That’s because resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse. . . Grievance and victimization make us smaller and less generous and can thus serve only reactionaries and conservatives."

This is just silly as stated, the political left and political right have not conspired, but elements of both camps are limits people, regulators who can't stand the seeming disorder of dynamic systems in continuous evolution, though this is a hallmark of rude good health. They use resentment and fear to stampede society into accepting their nasty, bitter medicine. It isn't reactionaries and conservatives who benefit, it's stick-up-their-butts rule mongers of the left and right who benefit.

Examining Timothy's reaction to this passage with this lens is also revealing.

I can’t think of a better way to sum up why I reject the proposition that the way to fight unfair or malevolent attacks on the academy (or anything I value) is to out-shrill the shrill, out-swear the profane, out-simplify the simple-minded.

He takes the conservative position, counseling cautious reform of the academy without the imposition of external regulation, a blunt instrument that might damage the academy while perhaps not even achieving desired reforms. That he seeks to conserve traditions that others see as being leftist and radical illuminates the true conflict, and points a way forward.

Update:

Resorting to regulation is intellectual failure.

THE news out of Kansas is certainly welcome; for the first time in this country, a new coal plant has been rejected by a regulatory body based on the potential for increased carbon emissions. Fighting new coal capacity must be a key part of any effort to combat climate change. It only takes a few new coal-burning plants to swamp efficiency gains made in forward-looking cities around the country.

Fighting new coal fired power plants can't possibly accomplish any useful purpose. It's not about fighting, you can't combat climate change. As noted, all of the regulatory wanking in cities around the country are trivial. A few coal fired plants, even if they are in China, negate all the ineffectual regulation. It's global climate change.

With a nationally interconnected transmission network, it does little good to halt new coal capacity in one state if the residents or regulatory authorities in other states are unwilling to reduce their coal use. In the first New York Times story linked above, Stephen Miller, a representative of the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation which planned to build the new generators, noted that the company might respond to the ruling by building new transmission capacity to a coal-burning plant in neighboring Missouri.

OK, so you don't have to go all the way to China to negate urban emissions wanking.

The root of carbon emissions and climate change is the fact that consumers don't directly face the cost of the pollution they generate.

Horse shit. The root of climate change is population growth and development. That root is growing larger and stronger. You can't save your way out of this problem, you have to develop better and more affordable ways to generate the power necessary to feed that root. Failure to do so means all sorts of hurt, probably wars, certainly privation and worse for those who can't bear much more of it.

Coal is a good target for greens and an easy one, but there is a chance that, despite its dirtiness, there are more economically sound ways to cut emissions. It could be the case that the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas output to acceptable levels is to drastically limit vehicle miles traveled.

Acceptable levels? How are those determined? This is a freaking Drake equation, a nonsense equation. None of the terms of the equation could even in theory be determined.

Kudos, then, to those achieving new success in fighting coal capacity. We ought to make their jobs easier by crafting better national energy policy.

It would make their jobs easier, but it would have no effect at all on global climate. Their jobs are to delude the public with bread and circuses while they loot the treasury and live high on the hog.

Update:

Regulation is government failure.

The problem with supercapitalism, apparently, is that when the government has massive power to interfere in markets, firms will compete to use the government to get a leg up on the competition. . .

[T]he arms-control agreement would be some kind of constitutional change that strictly limits the scope of goverment's spending and regulatory powers. That is, the way to end the arms race of legislative favour-giving is to put an end to the legislative capacity of favour-giving. Unless there is a secret warehouse teeming with vats of nutritive fluid in which a new genetic strain of wholly civic-minded statesmen is being incubated, there is no other way; laws about the proper scope of law-making need to rein the politicians in. Now, as history shows, clever office-seekers will find ways around even the tightest constitutional constraints. But some kind of truce of rectitude among politicians (and a pony!) can be nothing more than a utopian wish. Politics provides legislators strong incentives to myopia; it is an advantage to see no further than next election. And what do you call the first "warring faction" to defect from the arms-control agreement? A majority.

They'd hack the nutritive fluid to insert trap doors in the new, lemony fresh, wholly civic-minded statesmen so that they could be zombied at opportune moments.