"In an open call on X yesterday with Republican Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, apartheid billionaire Elon Musk — whose father says he was chauffeured to school in white-run South Africa in a Rolls Royce — lit into the regulations that created and protect the American middle class and our democracy:
“Regulations, basically, should be default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
In a child-like echo of Ayn Rand, Musk added:
“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So, we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done. … If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”
We know this is crazy: Every state in the union has put into place an agency to regulate insurance companies because that very industry has a long, horrible history of ripping people off and refusing to pay claims unless the power of the state is invoked against them.
We regulate banks and brokerages for the same reason; when we deregulated them in the 1920s and the late 1990s the result was huge rip-offs that produced the Republican Great Depression and the Bush Crash of 2008.
We regulate automobile manufacturers because they have a history of putting profits over the lives of their customers (Ford Pinto 900 dead, GM trucks 2000 dead, etc.); refineries because their emissions cause cancer and asthma; drugs because unscrupulous manufacturers killed people in previous eras; workplace safety after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 young women; voting because corrupt politicians rigged elections.
We regulate traffic with signs and stoplights to keep order and reduce accidents; we regulate police to prevent them from abusing innocent people; we regulate building codes so peoples’ homes don’t collapse or catch on fire from faulty cheap wiring.
And we regulate agriculture and food production so that the groceries we buy at the store don't make us sick or kill us. We regulate pollution, industrial externalities, so that the water we drink or air we breathe doesn't poison or kill us. Etc.
America's captain of industry and icon of the future, the man who built the first popular electric car, actually thinks we get to some green sustainable future, without devastating wild fires in January, without increasing droughts and water shortages, without any regulations?! Or, if we inadvertently get rid of a necessary regulation, we'll just add it back later-- after how many people, or how many rich people, or how many rich white people die? Regulations, any regulations, all regulations, just get in the way of people getting stuff done, says Musk?!
Of course, there are useless, wasteful, out-dated regulations, undoubtably many. Those that obstruct people from getting stuff done, NIMBY zoning laws getting in the way of more housing, say, ought to be identified and removed through the democratic process. But wiping out all regulations or rules, it should be obvious to anyone, is a completely stupid and childish idea.
Oh, but anti-regulation sentiment is popular, 60-40, or whatever, so we can't win elections by opposing popular sentiment! How did we get to such a catastrophically stupid place as a country?
Getting frustrated with the democratic process or bureaucracy and gridlock and the difficulties of getting stuff done is everybody's experience and isn't new. So, again, identify some bad regulations and get your republican congress to remove them. Do the work. This is just moronic wishful thinking passing for leadership, and people mistaking destruction and breaking things for bold innovation.
Regulations or the law or the so-called Deep State getting in the way of some megalomaniac neo-nazi billionaire and his gang of tech bro acolytes wiping out all regulations or departments of government, or the ones they don't like anyway, is now not only a good thing, I mean the resistance in the system these fascists are targeting, but actually crucial to the survival of democracy and good government.
And you don't have to be pollyanna about any good government in our past to recognize that this is a massive power grab and assault on the human welfare of the general population. Can our checks and balances hold up under this democratically elected assault on government? We'll see but it's not looking good.
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