The Case for Regulation is Going Viral

For decades we’ve been bombarded by anti-government propaganda. Leave things to the Free Market, to the Big Society, to generous philanthropists, to brilliant entrepreneurs – and tell government to back off, and we’ll end up with the best of all possible worlds.

This mantra knocks every regulatory measure as unnecessary ‘red tape’, every rule as an infringement against our liberty, every policy initiative as a drain on resources that should have been left in individuals’ own pockets.

But the reality is that without a democratically responsive government to deal with the many problems that would otherwise be left to fester, we would all end up significantly worse off. While this is obvious to a lot of people, it is sad – and at times tragic – that there are many who are disposed to ignore it until something terrible happens.

Health and safety requirements are dismissed as irksome, until innocent people are killed and then we get the outcry about deficient legal standards. Financial institutions wind people up about the state getting in the way of their business, until they mess up and insist the government must step in to help them. Environmental protection is resented as costly and unnecessary, until repeated flooding destroys homes and residents call for urgent action. Privatisation is lauded as the way forward, until the gross inadequacy of profit-based care provision leaves families in despair and people demand government to come up with an alternative.

Now the rapid spread of Covid-19 around the world is leaving us with no doubt. Just leaving individuals and businesses to act on their own with no coordination or supportive intervention would be disastrous. We need government to pool resources when few individuals can spend their own way out of a global pandemic. We need regulation to prevent a dangerous problem from worsening. We need collective planning and action to find the means to tackle a major threat. We need an established authority to bring the evidence and expertise together and apply them to devising suitable solutions.

Anti-government ideologues and laissez faire opportunists will no doubt continue to make out that the world is better off with government powers shrunk to just the level sufficient to help the rich or defend certain fundamentalist sects, but no more. Yet the case against them is inescapable. Everyone across the world can see, we cannot leave what happens all around us to irresponsible individuals who care more about the hotels and gold courses they own than the fate of their fellow citizens. We need government institutions that engage in the democratic concerns of the public, and we need political leaders who prioritise citizens’ wellbeing above all else. If we haven’t got them, we must make urgent changes.