Trump's putdown of wind energy whips up a backlash in Iowa

[Igel]

22. One of the big takeaways from looking at many examples of government regulation is this.

It works for air pollution, water pollution, anti-poverty, anti-discrimination programs, a fairly wide variety of activities.

By the time government steps in to save the day, the trendline for whatever it is that's so horrible has been improving for years. This only makes sense given the political process in the US. By the time there's enough popular outcry for something and public support to make it worth politicians' attention and effort people have been complaining to businesses or doing things differently on their own. If a problem's too big and means that the government made up of "we the people" has to tell a majority of "we the people" to stuff it and get in line, it's not going to happen. You can't easily reconcile the government's ordering around a majority of its citizens around outside of wartime or national emergency with the idea of a democracy. (Well, except for SCOTUS when it re-interprets a law, but I did say "democracy"--rule by SCOTUS is an oligocracy, something we love when we agree with it but hate when we're on the losing end.)

Totalitarian, non-democratic regimes have a real issue with things like rights, the environment, that sort of thing that progressives generally claim exclusive dibs on, and it doesn't matter if those regimes are left or right of center.

In a few cases, improvement speeds up under government supervision. In more cases, improvement continues at the same pace for quite a while. You look at the historical trend and the only thing that lets you know a federal law was passed is an arrow or comment nothing that some law took affect. It arguably makes a real difference when the incidence of the bad behavior gets sufficiently low: government can drive the disapproved of behavior or situation to a much lower level than mere public pressure, but seldom manages to completely dispose of it (because to drive a behavior to zero requires a really extreme level of totalitarianism, a level many strong advocates of the law seem to approve of when it affects not-themselves).

Take something like public education. By the time elementary school was required at the state level, most people were already finishing elementary school. By the time middle/junior-high was required, most people were finishing it. Half of the population got their high school degree for the first time just before the US joined WWII and didn't achieve that awesome 50% number until a couple of years after the war. And high-school became required (until you were 16, still the law in some states) years after that number was reached, pretty much always in states that had already long passed the 50% mark. In a few the state legislatures decided they needed to play catch-up.