Be careful what you wish for.

[Griff]

The big government vs small government fight is supposedly on again. I'd rather we framed it as insensible vs sensible regulation. From the Bush years we got a lot of targeted deregulation and some regulation organized around the principle that what is good for big business is good for America. This turned into the recent subsidies for too big to fail companies. The democrats end up taking a lot of heat for increasing regulation often because it is poorly done or they fail to argue it as a protection of small business or competitiveness. Net neutrality would be an obvious case where regulation could protect innovation. An argument against regulation would be our present situation where small scale local slaughterhouses were put out of business by the good intentions of the left mixing with the reality that agribusiness owns agricultural rule-making. Here are some opinions on ag reg from the NYTimes. A lot of libertarian ideas make sense in isolation, but the reality has always been that those ideas are used by the GOP as excuses to deregulate to the advantage of big business. Maybe the Dems need to steal some of the rhetoric and the occasional idea.