In January 1996, President Bill Clinton declared that "The era of big government is over," albeit while arguing that "we can't go back to a time when our citizens were just left to fend for themselves." In his clearest statement yet that he he is running against not only Bush but also the centrist DLC, Howard Dean today told the Washington Post that:
The former Vermont governor said he would reverse the trend toward deregulation pursued by recent presidents -- including, in some respects, Bill Clinton -- to help restore faith in scandal-plagued U.S. corporations and better protect U.S. workers.
In an interview around midnight Monday on his campaign plane with a small group of reporters, Dean listed likely targets for what he dubbed as his "re-regulation" campaign: utilities, large media companies and any business that offers stock options. Dean did not rule out "re-regulating" the telecommunications industry, too.Since virtually all US corporations now use stock options, Dean is basically talking about "re-regulating" the entire economy. Predictably, the blogosphere is all over it. Notable posts include: Virginia Postrel (link via Pejman Yousefzadeh), Tyler Cowen, BusinessPundit, Steve at Deinonychus antirrhopus, and Sean Hackbarth at TAM. Joe Lieberman, who remains the Democrat who impresses me most, was prompt in condemnation:
"[Dean] would give us a treacherous trifecta of policies that turn back the economic clock: new trade barriers, a larger tax burden on our middle class and now bigger bureaucracy," Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) said in a statement. "Either he doesn't know how to turn the economy around, or this is another reckless mistake."UPDATE: Robert Prather notes:
Dean is repudiating much of what we have learned economically over the last twenty-five years and, for those too young to remember, the 1970's sucked. High inflation and high unemployment were the defining characteristics of that decade and regulation of economic activity contributed mightily to the latter of the two. Even Clinton had more sense than that. As the article notes, if Dean follows this path he'll be repudiating the Clinton years and the prosperity that happened on his watch.Well said, indeed. The GOP's economic policies are annoying the heck out of me right now (e.g., here and here), but Dean's scare the heck out of me. Stuart Buck has a fair and balanced take on the subject, which still manages to make Dean look bad:
Most of the criticism ... seems to focus on the mere fact that Dean appeared to favor "re-regulation." One can have a reasonable debate over how much regulation is needed, what its terms should be, whether complete regulation is better than deregulating half-way, and so forth.
But Dean's comment about telecommunications isn't even comprehensible. Telecommunications is overwhelmingly regulated right now, as much as or more than any other American industry. I can't even imagine how anyone could think that there is an undersupply of regulation in that particular field. (The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has sometimes been described as "deregulation," but nothing could be further from reality.) [Ed.: Emphasis in original.]
