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Government regulation -- who needs it?

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Government regulation -- who needs it?

POSTED: Thursday, March 10, 2011, 3:56 PM

Watching the rise of the Tea Party movement these last couple of years, the place where their argument against big government really falls apart comes over the need for regulations in a free-market capitalist system. A couple of things that week in particular drove home that idea. The first was watching Tea Party icon Sen. Rand Paul hawking his new book and stating his case with Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" earlier this week. Paul tried to make the argument that all regulation is bad regulation -- but he couldn't.

As noted by the website (ahem) Treehugger:

Now, the most important thing to keep in mind here is how Paul keeps repeating the refrain that "things are a lot better now" for the environment than they were in the 60s and before, but he fails to acknowledge that this is almost exclusively thanks to the implementation of a series of powerful environmental laws: The Clean Water Act, the creation of the EPA, and the Clean Air Act.

Holding corporations accountable to the standards they created has forced them to pollute less and run cleaner operations -- the American business community didn't just uniformly decide to clean up their ways for the betterment of the public (despite what they may want you to think). It was years of holding corporations' feet to the fire, the promise of expensive and irritating lawsuits, and the potential of punitive fines that got them to green up their acts -- not a change of heart.

So the amount of regulation we have now is just right...right? Not really. I literally had just finished watching the Stewart-Paul showdown when I got an email from a good friend who's a political and PR consultant doing some work with a Texas attorney named Ed Blizzard, a guy who's made a career filing lawsuits against Big Pharma because just like the polluters, the drug companies "didn't just uniformly decide to clean up their ways for the betterment of the public."

The latest outrage from this attorney's file: Thousands of patients who received toxic hip replacements -- infecting patients, incredibly, with toxins like chromium, the same cancer-caujsing substance at the heart of the movie "Erin Brockavich." They were manufactured by DePuy Orthopaedics, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson a few miles up U.S. 1 from here in New Brunswick, N.J. DePuy has already recalled 93,000 of the devices and the president of the subsidiary has resigned -- but none of this had to happen:

The brief and troubled life of DePuy’s A.S.R. hip points to a medical implant system that is piecemeal and broken on many fronts, critics say. Unlike new drugs, many of which go through a series of clinical trials before receiving approval from the Food and Drug Administration, critical implants can be sold without such testing if a device, like an artificial hip, resembles an implant already approved and used on patients.

Here's more:

An internal agency review released several months ago found numerous flaws with the process, and the F.D.A. is proposing changes to it. To win agency permission to market the A.S.R. in the United States, DePuy never had to perform any patient testing of it. Agency officials said the company cited clinical data it had used five years earlier to win F.D.A. approval to sell another all-metal hip implant called the Ultima. The Ultima, however, used a cup that had a totally different design than the one used with the A.S.R.

Nevermind that in Rand Paul's tea-baked vision for the U.S. of A., the FDA is the vanguard of a freedom-squashing big government. Look, all regulations aren't created equally -- some of them (like making businesses file a 1099 for expenses over $600, for example) really are intrusive or just plain stupid, but in many areas adult supervision is needed to prevent the kind of abuses that can actually kill. In Rand Paul's America, we move toward the sunlight of freedom with a pronounced limp.

Will Bunch @ 3:56 PM Permalink | 9 comments

9 comments

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Comments (9)

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0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 4:33 PM, 03/10/2011

Even most sane Republicans don't want less regulation though. Most people on both sides of the political spectrum whom I speak with want more regulation in a lot of areas. Hey, but who can pass more regulation laws when states are just using parlimentary tricks to pass wide-reaching laws, right?

— HandNik

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 4:38 PM, 03/10/2011

Does it pain you guys to live life with your thumbs in your ears and blinders on or do you get used to it after a while?

— sla6yer

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0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 7:07 PM, 03/10/2011

///the place where their argument against big government really falls apart comes over the need for regulations///

Government need not be large in order to be effective. It should be minimal but powerful, and possess the power of enforcement. Wasn't it Truman who once said "When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."

— General Turgidson

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 8:29 PM, 03/10/2011

Will, don't have a cow! I think Senator Paul is concerned about the proliferation of regulations written by White House appointees (czars) which are not supported by enacted laws. It is too easy for this to happen and too hard to get Congress to invalidate those regulations. We The People are not represented when the White House writes its own laws.

— Falls Ed

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 11:38 AM, 03/11/2011

Hey Will, new commenter and fairly new reader here who has to say that my only disagreement with your entry regarding governmental regulation has to do with the repeal of the requirement that businesses file 1099s for any expenditures of over $600 they will claim as a business expense. That is a very much needed reform. Small businesses, especially ones dealing with a cash-paying clientele, routinely divert much of that cash out of the business as unreported income or, if it's used for business purposes, use it to employ workers off-the-books, avoiding other business fees and taxes. As a retired attorney who has a lot of experience representing small businesses and their reorganization or demise in bankruptcy, I was always amazed at how much money was shuffled off in that manner with few, if any, consequences for the business owners.

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Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.

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