Fly4Fun;1458632 wrote:Yes, and I've seen their posts before and what I understand to be their general world view that is in line or similar to the rest of this political forum.
If they want to reject the general interpretation of the voting patterns of the Court and individual justices, that's fine. But Roberts and the Supreme Court are currently considered to be conservative (usually pretty slightly, but still on the conservative side). That doesn't mean they decide a with whatever is considered to be the "conservative" view of an issue every time, as that's not their job.
It always is amusing reading this forum though, and this little exchange demonstrates why. But the same reason it is amusing is why I typically don't post here.
Now a response more towards majorspark post:
Left-Right, liberal-conservative, yes I know they aren't always the same thing. But the idea that major spark is seemingly advocating that there are "two sides," which are centralized big government (also referred to as command and control, which is the idea of government telling the industry or people what to do, what the limits are etc.), what he seems to refer to as statism, and the the other side of deregulation in regards to economics and just no social intervention with regards to social issues is not the true story of the current evolving discussion and practice of governance models. I'm not sure if that's exactly what major sparks believes as I haven't followed his posts with the purpose of understanding his ideological beliefs. But the current discussion that has been evolving revolves around the idea of "new governance."
Now what is new governance has yet to be defined in a way that people agree on it, but that is where the discussion is going and there have been plenty of examples in our countries relatively recent history. But generally it involves the idea of a cooperation/collaboration relationship between the regulators, regulated and stakeholders to align their goals as opposed to the traditional adversarial relationship, better communications between the parties, involvement of 3rd parties private stakeholders, decentralization of decision making, harnessing market forces and flexibility. Now depending on who you are reading the definitions and terminology (reflexive law, collaborative governance, regulatory capitalism, decentered governance, etc.), and overall description can change, but often that is just a difference of perspective with similar aspects between them.
But the debate of deregulation vs. big government isn't really what's going on anymore.
The hands off approach of Laissez Faire only was ever a governance model because governments did not have the tools to intervene and so they didn't. But as scientific tools and human inventions "closed" the world to the point that we are more connected than ever because of the ease of communication and transportation, and as the economic realities required some intervention by the government, such as the stock markets and fraud leading up to the Great Depression crippling our country (think blue sky laws), the idea of command and control seemed like the answer. Free markets were and still are no longer considered as a perfect tool as there are market imperfections and externalization of costs that lead to inequalities (an easily understandable externalization is pollution, basically unless companies/people are forced to consider it they generally don't in their decision making process as it's not a cost they have to bare). At the time of the depression the predominant notion that won out was that government finally had the scientific tools, know-how, and ability to better manage and a hands off approach was no longer feasible.
Now command and control went on for a while then there was the notion of deregulation (privitization) not only here in the U.S. but also around the world and the UK is often tied into the deregulation discussion. But that was really just a misnomer deregulation as while different industries that were run by the government were "deregulated" different private regulating bodies became (methods such as business associations, civil societies, international authorities, and even self regulation by business themselves) and laws regulating the now privatized industries began to spring up to. The ideology behind getting rid of the command and control or big government system was based upon the notion of slack and inefficiencies without market forces to correct them (such as basic competition ideas). Now at this point we have gone through a swing of free market and then a change in governance styles because of inefficiencies and problems that can arise to that to a command and control model that has it's own problems. Now the deregulation as previously mentioned wasn't just back to hands off. This is where you get the more new governance concepts.
Now the discussion has been on how to describe the new governance approaches.
For example, reflexive law is based upon systems theory. In systems theory it is understood that society has become so complex that different aspects of society have developed their own system or way of communicating (a simplified example is the legal system deals in "right or wrong" while corporations deal in "profitable or not profitable"). And when different systems try to communicate with each other they often misunderstand each other which can lead to outcomes that are not desirable. For example, the government is trying to cut down on pollution so it passes a law that all new factories or future modifications to current factories dealing with that kind of pollution have to have a certain technology to reduce it (The Clean Air Act "New Source Review" NSR); this is the government thinking in terms of right or wrong. Now the result can be (and actually was) that some factories decided it was more economically efficient (profitable) to extend the life of current factories without major modifications to trigger the law instead of building new factories; this is a corporation thinking in terms of profitable or not profitable. So the effect of the mis-communication was more pollution which is the complete opposite of the desired result.
Reflexive law seeks to deal with this kind of situation through communication based strategies (i.e. requiring corporation to reachout and communicate with stakeholders), information based strategies (requiring corporation to collect data on their pollution and disclose to stakeholders), or procedure based strategies (i.e. requiring corporations to go through a process to plan and maybe even require a decision on how they will curtail pollution). With the first two strategies the idea is that the stakeholders would bring pressure on the corporation to reduce pollution. With the third strategy the idea is that just requiring them to go through the motions so they can come up with a better solution as they have first hand knowledge, and it would be applicable specifically to them instead of a non-flexible regulation that applies to everyone even though it can affect different corporations in different ways because of the situations or even location.
Now beyond reflexive law I mentioned a few other ways such as regulatory capitalism, which generally is the idea that as regulation advanced so did the tools or methods to the point that it could be an industry or a current industry expanding such as accounting firms, or banks decide whether or not to give corporate loans (which regulates for sound corporate governance), or insurance companies can do the same with whether they decide to give an insurance policy.
Collaborative Governance, another form of new governance, is more simply the idea that the regulators and all the stakeholders would work together in a information exchanging process to help come up with and decide on the best solution for the problem. An example of this is the Negotiated Rulemaking Act. It proscribes a collaborative process as opposed to the older adversarial notice and comment method. The former doesn't have the government control the discussion by initially outlining the terms and thus the comments have to be related to that, as with a collaborative process the stakeholders and government all have a voice at the beginning.
I completely understand that this has become a very long post not entirely related to the topic, but I am responding to the accusation that I didn't even read what spark wrote. I'm explaining that it's naive to think that it's just a black and white discussion of "big government vs. small or no government (libertarians)" and thus responding to a simplification of the realities of the world doesn't really advance a discussion.
There are and have been many different attempts by the United States government and governments around the world to use different processes that don't fall within the traditional notions of command and control to regulate.
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