“White House to Scale Back Regulations on Businesses”

Dear Leader must be reading the polls. And the polls are telling him it’s time to become the conservative, pro-business Dear Leader. WSJ:

The Obama administration will release final plans Tuesday for ending or cutting back hundreds of regulations, an effort to reduce the burden on business and counter criticism that the White House is tone-deaf to business concerns.Certain railroad cars won’t have to install expensive technology, hospitals will be able to skip a round of federal paperwork and low-risk travelers to the U.S. will enjoy expedited entry, officials said. Some businesses will be allowed to file federal forms electronically.

The administration estimates that about a dozen of the changes will save businesses some $10 billion over five years, with other smaller initiatives adding to the total.

But the changes don’t affect the broad thrust of major administration initiatives that have drawn criticism from businesses, such as proposed rules to reduce carbon emissions and laws passed last year that aim to protect consumers from financial and health-insurance abuses.

The White House said it sought to eliminate “dumb” rules without undermining the underlying goals. “We are going to implement statutes that have been enacted in the last few years, but we’re trying to do it in a way that is as careful with respect to cost and as attuned with the economic situation as possible,” said Cass Sunstein, administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, who oversaw the regulatory review.

Let me add this reminder here: Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulations Czar, is a proponent of the absurdly framed “libertarian paternalism” theory, whereby government proposals are meant to “nudge” us into doing what he and his kind have themselves determined is “good and right” — albeit without coming across as authoritarian. In other words, Liberal fascism — only framed in such a way that we’re to believe that we still have free will and individual autonomy.

Filtered through that context, Sunstein’s desire to “eliminate ‘dumb’ rules without undermining the underlying goals” is simply a desire to do away with those rules whose framing as unobtrusive and somehow spontaneously ordered by the very forces of civic conscience hasn’t really taken; that is, their authoritarian brush strokes are showing. Eliminating them, then, becomes a token gesture meant to protect the larger plan — the “underlying goals” — which are to order society in the way Sunstein and those like him have determined it needs to be ordered, and in so doing, to forge the kind of population those of high culture like Sunstein or Obama or others in the Faculty Lounge Administration won’t be so loath to find themselves among.

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