regulation, Republicans and reality

The Republicans have decided that the reason they are hanging on to billions of dollars and not hiring is regulation. "Government regulation" is a easy villain, amorphous, yet omnipresent. Like 'Liberal" most Americans, decent folks all, automatically think "government bureaucrats" are obsessed with "taking away our freedoms" We need to answer this head on. Most of the underlying laws that establish authority to regulate were, and are, based on real life deaths, poisonings, toxic events etc that were bad enough a law got past. Rule writing can lead to gibberish in trying to cover every possible contingency. Could be improved? Yes. Eliminated, like the latest batch of Republican presidential aspirants want? Cuyahoga on fire, Lake Erie on fire, the whole Upper Mid west on fire because it had ALL been clearcut with the scrap heaped in huge fuel piles. We tried letting business voluntarily deciding to use the commons as a waste heap in the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. We got Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga rivers burning.

Britain and the Right Left divide laid clear , again..

The London riots offer a clear window into one aspect of the Great Divide; does understanding the motivations of rioters encourages them and that the rioters are all just criminals. I would not want to advertise that my city has 10,000 criminals just waiting for, what?, to destroy. If there is no underlying truth beneath the riots then your city has thousands of "super-predators" teenagers who destroy with no provocation. I listen to a British Dept Mayor Kit Malthouse say we should think of all the kids who go to school and behave. This kind of thinking flows effortlessly into a concept some are born bad, or less than human. This attitude allowed Britain to rule millions of people in Asia and Africa brutally yet consider them selves the crown of creation, the highest, best thing that (post Spencer) ever evolved. We see this today.