Wait, Donald Trump is a libertarian now according to CNN? I thought he was a fascist? Or was it authoritarian? Maybe Trump was a communist because the media is so interested in whatever ties Trump has to Vladimir Putin? It seems the corrupt media’s definition of Donald Trump changes on an hourly basis these days. It’s so bad at CNN, that they are claiming that Barack Hussein Obama was a better “libertarian” than Trump, because Donald Trump is cutting regulations and Obama didn’t. This is how whacked out crazy CNN is these days. It’s actually quite funny to watch. CNN also writes that those who benefits from Trump’s regulation cuts are “thugs” or something.
| CNN headline: Trump’s phony libertarianism endangers the public |
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President Trump’s recent executive order, titled “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Cost,” speaks the language of the principled libertarians, but its beneficiaries are likely to be the thugs.
The order prohibits any agency from issuing any new regulation unless it also repeals two regulations that cost as much as the new one. “Costs” mean the cost of complying with the regulation. The harms that were the reason for the regulation don’t count at all.
David Dana and Michael Barsa observe the implications of Trump’s order. The Department of Interior created a set of new regulations in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, in which BP spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest marine oil spill in history, and, Dana and Barsa wrote, it cost “nearly $9 billion for lost fisheries and $23 billion for lost tourism, not to mention the catastrophic effects on marine life and birds. Yet under the president’s order, the only costs that matter are those to the oil companies. Costs to the public and to the environment are completely ignored.” The regulations aren’t cheap; the cost to the industry has been estimated at hundreds of millions. But that’s peanuts compared to the costs of another spill.
Trump is a big fan of Ayn Rand. Like her fictional hero John Galt in “Atlas Shrugged,” he wants to free business from the heavy hand of government. But this is an oddly distorted libertarianism, in which Rand’s villains masquerade as her heroes: those who talk most of liberty are the looters and moochers.
Conservatives worry about “regulatory capture”: the danger that regulators will abandon the public interest at the behest of regulated industries, keeping prices high and stifling competition. The solution is to get rid of regulation: the state should butt out and let the market operate. There’s no doubt that capture has sometimes happened. A notorious example is the Civil Aeronautics Board: after it was abolished in 1985, airline competition intensified and prices plunged.
There is, however, another way in which unworthy special interests can seize control of government. They can work to cripple regulation, so that they can hurt and defraud people. Libertarian rhetoric has turned out to be a rich resource for them.