bowste

Yes, we are a nation of laws. But we have *too many* laws, and most of them were never passed by Congress but were instead enacted as federal “rules” by unelected bureaucrats. Dismantling that bureaucracy shouldn’t be a partisan issue. In fact, it should be *the most unifying issue* in America, as the following case study reveals: In 1938, FDR signed a bill creating the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), an “independent agency” that crushed the life out of the airline industry. If you wanted to start up a new airline, you needed a permission slip from the CAB. The board also decided how much you could charge for a ticket & what routes you were allowed to fly. In 40 years of the CAB’s existence, not a single new airline opened for business. It was a textbook example of regulatory capture crowding out the competition. Republican President Gerald Ford got the ball rolling in 1975 when he proposed reducing the CAB's power. Other key players in the anti-CAB movement were Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, Senate staffer (and future SCOTUS justice) Stephen Breyer, and Jimmy Carter (who replaced Ford in the White House). In 1978, the bill abolishing the CAB passed the House 363-8 and passed the Senate 82-4. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch explains what happened next in his new book, “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law”: “[B]etween 1978 and 2011, base ticket prices dropped by almost 40 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. As a result, millions of people flocked to the skies for the first time. An activity that had once belonged largely to elites became one that many Americans take more or less for granted.” Ronald Reagan said that federal agencies were “the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth.” But that’s only true if we let it be true. Prosperity is unifying, and the path back to it requires shutting down the regulatory state.