The Heritage Insider: How the regulatory state threatens your freedom, and we've got a new website coming soon
September 26, 2015
Coming Soon: A New Insider!
We are currently upgrading THE INSIDER website (www.insideronline.org) so that you can more easily find the best conservative and classical liberal policy research and analysis; essays on marketing, fundraising, networking, and leadership; and upcoming events from across the conservative movement.
Our updates for the next week or two might look a little different while we are getting ready to launch the new site. Hang tight and the regularly scheduled programming will resume soon.
In the meantime, we encourage our friends and allies to do three things:
First, if you are attending the State Policy Network Annual Meeting next week in Grand Rapids and would like to connect with us there, send us a note to alex.adrianson@heritage.org. We’ll give you a preview of the new website and find out what else is going on. We’ll be there for the whole meeting.
Second, continue sending us your organization’s updates.
Third, read the new issue of The Insider magazine (below).
The Insider: The New Tyranny: How the Regulatory State Threatens Your Freedom
Complexity in the law is a bug to the citizen but a feature to the bureaucrat and lawmaker. Families teach us to be good citizens. Doing fundraising teaches you to be a good fundraiser. You’ll find those topics in the latest edition of The Insider [Fall 2015]:
Is Self-Government Slipping Away?
We humans are always looking for something new and better—the next wiz-bang, uncharted frontiers, secret knowledge, or perhaps just a new hangout to hang our hats. Such discovering is part of the joy of life. But people aren’t always joyful about the corollary of discovery—an unknowable future. When new technologies or shifting preferences threaten jobs or businesses, some would prefer it if their fellow citizens were a little less free to find new options. And sometimes they succeed in enlisting government to protect them with its taxing, spending, and regulating powers.
Friedrich Hayek pointed out that as government pursues a policy of providing economic security to some, more and more groups seek that security for themselves at the expense of liberty. Prosperity suffers, since the only way to give everyone security is to prevent everyone from finding better ways of serving consumers. As the political demand for economic security is a constant, Hayek’s warnings are always in season. Thus, we offer here an excerpt from Don Boudreaux’s recent book The Essential Hayek. [False Economic Security and the Road to Serfdom]
Ultimately, relying on government for protection is false security; it gives someone else a power over your fate that did not exist before. In our cover story, John Cochrane takes up this theme by pointing out how the regulatory state has gotten into the protection racket, too. He observes, for example, that the rules written by regulators today are rarely so clear and simple that a business can easily know where the safe ground is. That is probably by design. Agencies have discretion to apply the rules as they see fit—discretion that is becoming a dangerous lever of political control. [The New Tyranny: How the Regulatory State Threatens Your Freedom]
In the growing complexity of law and regulation, Bruce Thornton sees a related problem: that the only people who really understand how government works are those entrusted with its management, i.e., those “experts” who will naturally champion whatever the government is doing. Democratic accountability suffers. [Are We Smart Enough for Democracy]
In other articles this issue, Carson Holloway explains how strong families are an essential support of a free society [America’s Culture of Liberty], and we share John Von Kannon’s lessons from a lifetime of fundraising. [The Education of a Fundraiser]
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