Concept

Deregulation

Overview

Deregulation is the process of removing or reducing state regulations, typically in the economic sphere. It is the repeal of governmental regulation of the economy. It became common in advanced industrial economies in the 1970s and 1980s, as a result of new trends in economic thinking about the inefficiencies of government regulation, and the risk that regulatory agencies would be controlled by the regulated industry to its benefit, and thereby hurt consumers and the wider economy. Economic regulations were promoted during the Gilded Age, in which progressive reforms were claimed as necessary to limit externalities like corporate abuse, unsafe child labor, monopolization, and pollution, and to mitigate boom and bust cycles. Around the late 1970s, such reforms were deemed burdensome on economic growth and many politicians espousing neoliberalism started promoting deregulation.

The stated rationale for deregulation is often that fewer and simpler regulations will lead to raised levels of competitiveness, therefore higher productivity, more efficiency and lower prices overall. Opposition to deregulation may involve apprehension regarding environmental pollution and environmental quality standards (such as the removal of regulations on hazardous materials), financial uncertainty, and constraining monopolies.

Regulatory reform is a parallel development alongside deregulation. Regulatory reform refers to organized and ongoing programs to review regulations with a view to minimizing, simplifying, and making them more cost-effective. Such efforts, given impetus by the Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980, are embodied in the United States Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and the United Kingdom's Better Regulation Commission. Cost–benefit analysis is frequently used in such reviews. In addition, there have been regulatory innovations, usually suggested by economists, such as emissions trading.

Deregulation can be distinguished from privatization, which transfers state-owned businesses to the private sector.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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It would, therefore, be much more proper to be established as a perpetual and unalterable regulation, or as what is called a fundamental law of the commonwealth, than any tax which was always to be levied according to a certain valuation. Some states, instead of the simple and obvious expedient of a register of leases, have had recourse to the laborious and expensive one of an actual survey and valuation of all the…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
States what Deregulation is; the author is tied to Deregulation in the knowledge graph.
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When those companies do not trade upon a joint stock, but are obliged to admit any person, properly qualified, upon paying a certain fine, and agreeing to submit to the regulations of the company, each member trading upon his own stock, and at his own risk, they are called regulated companies. When they trade upon a joint stock, each member sharing in the common profit or loss, in proportion to his share in this…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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These economic laws of production are modified by the different stages of this form of production. But generally speaking, the entire period of civilization is dominated by these laws. To this day, the product controls the producer. To this day, the aggregate production of society is managed, not on a uniform plan, but by blind laws, that rule with elementary force and find their final expression in the storms of…
Friedrich Engels, The origin of the family, private property, and the state
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Philosophers who discussed Deregulation

Petre P. Negulescu

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Place in the tradition

Part of Conservatism.

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