WHY WE NEED BIG GOVERNMENT

 Bashing so called big government has been a go to talking point for right wing media for years.  Really, just putting the two words together conjures an  imposing and frightening image of a government imposing its will on the people like something out of Orwell's 1984 novel. (Or perhaps something by Ayn Rand).

But the boogeyman of big government is actually a lot less scary than what can happen when there's a lack of government in the form of regulations.  Recently, a train derailment in the small town of East Palestine Ohio released nearly 116,000 gallons of vinyl chloride.  The effects of this on the local people are potentially devastating, with possible health issues lasting for years.  While there has been the usual amount of finger pointing from both sides of the political fence, about this,one thing is clear: a train carrying such dangerous chemicals should have had more safety regulations.  Not surprisingly, such regulations were put in place by the Barack Obama administration and then were later repealed by the Donald Trump administration.  Now to be fair, it's unsure at this time if the Obama era regulations would have prevented the crash, but what it does show is how much corporate profits are often put over the safety of the American public.

A similar situation occurred recently with the bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank; once again, the Obama administration had passed a  series of regulations to avoid the same kind of banking crisis that tanked the economy back in 2008, and once again those regulations were weakened by the Trump administration in 2018, sowing the seeds for a once prosperous bank (SVB was  the 16th biggest bank in the country) to fall into ruin.

The frustrating thing about regulations is that there's no way to know just how many are needed; as these two examples show, some regulations are necessary, even in a free market.  But, as every Californian can tell you, the high speed rail train between San Francisco and Los Angeles that voters supported in 2008 has been so stymied by cost overruns and, yes, regulations, that it may never get built.

So again, there's no easy answer here, but to me, the real problem in this country isn't the amount of regulations, it's the lack of them (and the enforcement of them), which has brought on by the huge influence of money and lobbying in our government.  Ever since the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech in the Citizen's United case of 2010, more and more money has spent influencing (or you might call it bribing) the decisions of politicians, resulting in a country that is less safe overall.   When you compare America to other industrialized nations, it's clear that we generally have air, food and water, that is less clean than theirs, and we are more likely to be exposed to the kind of dangerous accident that occurred in Ohio.  An untamed free market can be a dangerous thing.