Bob Kuttner has an excellent essay in this month’s Harper’s Magazine, Obama’s Obama: The contradictions of Cass Sunstein. I’ll try to capture enough of the essence of it to motivate you to pick up a copy of this month’s Harper’s.
For those not familiar with him, Sunstein is a legal scholar (formerly at U. of Chicago, now at Harvard) and was Pres. Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) from 2009-2012. As OIRA isn’t well-known, I’ll quote Kuttner’s summary
OIRA was created late in the Carter Administration, but it was Ronald Reagan who first put it to political use. In 1981, Reagan directed all executive branch agencies to submit proposed regulations to OIRA for review by cost-benefit analysis. No agency rule could become final until cleared. Not surprisingly, the office quickly became a favorite end run for industry; OIRA could be counted on to delay, weaken, or simply veto proposed rules. The head of OIRA thus became the administration’s top anti-regulatory official.
Kuttner on how Sunstein approached his role as head of OIRA
As [Sunstein] recounts in [his book] Simpler … [he] hoped to use OIRA to advance three cherished objectives. He wanted to increase government’s transparency, make government more user-friendly, and regulate lightly via incentives, disclosures, and prods rather than commands. By the time he left office, OIRA, whose deliberations are secret, had become the graveyard of more direct measures to regulate abuses of markets. Sunstein writes, with evident pride, “the Obama Administration issued fewer regulations in its first four years than did the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations in their first four years.”
Why that’s a bug not a feature
To read Sunstein, you would think that government regulates because bureaucrats don’t trust people to act in their own self-interest. In Simpler, he flatly declares, “No sensible person believes that public officials should be making people’s choices for them. They shouldn’t.” But denying choices to ordinary people is not why a democratic government regulates. The necessary target of regulation, typically, is not misperception by “people” but misfeasance by corporations that individual consumers are powerless to remedy — and that leads to economic outcomes that are inefficient as well as unjust.
Government intervention can thus be liberty-enhancing, a point Sunstein himself occasionally concedes in passing. A person with less need for vigilance against poisoned food or toxic drinking water, a consumer who doesn’t have to spend hours or weeks making sure that the mortgage company is not corrupt, a worker protected from the risk that the industrial machinery could kill him — these are freer citizens.
Kuttner’s critique of Sunstein – and, by association, Pres. Obama – is damning. My excerpts above don’t do it justice. Pick up a copy of the Dec. issue of Harper’s and read the whole thing for yourself.