President Trump has made deregulation a priority and charged Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency with suggesting ways to cut red tape. Some progressives are cautiously supportive of deregulation. More should be.
From Jimmy Carter to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), progressives once saw the wisdom of cutting red tape — especially if that tape tied the hands of consumers and would-be competitors in order to privilege industry insiders.
After the election, Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) former chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, encouraged Democrats to embrace “supply-side progressivism,” calling for “limited deregulation that advances liberal policy goals.” He pointed to successful Democratic candidates like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) and Jared Golden (D-Maine), both of whom have raised the alarm about overregulation.
Vice President Kamala Harris recognized that the regulatory state sometimes hurts those whom it is supposed to help. In campaign proposals to address the housing crisis, she vowed to “take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels.”
Cautious Democratic support for deregulation may surprise those who think only of the Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) approach. Warren once claimed that “deregulation” was “just a code word for ‘let the rich guys do whatever they want.’”
In reality, regulations often help the rich guys at the expense of consumers and fair competition. New Deal regulations, for example, forced prices up in more than 500 industries, causing consumers to pay more for necessities like food and clothing when a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. Economists have documented similar price-raising regulation in agricultural, finance and urban transportation. In other cases, regulations require customers to buy certain products such as health insurance. Licensing rules protect incumbent service providers in hundreds of occupations despite little evidence that they protect consumers from harm.
More subtly, regulations can protect industry insiders by limiting the quantity of available services. State certificate-of-need laws in health care, for example, limit dozens of medical services in two-thirds of states, raising prices, throttling access, and undermining the quality of care.
That’s one reason why Rhode Island’s Democratic governor wants to reform his state’s certificate-of-need laws.
If you don’t believe that regulations protect big businesses instead of their customers, take a closer look at how firms lobby. In 2012, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association lobbied to maintain a ban on incandescent light bulbs. Why? Because it raised the costs of smaller, rival firms that specialized in making the cheaper bulbs. Local car dealerships lobby to preserve state restrictions on direct car sales, which limit potential competitors that sell online.
In international comparisons, researchers find that heavier regulatory burdens depress productivity growth and contribute to income inequality.
In the U.S., the accumulation of regulations between 1980 and 2012 is estimated to have reduced income per person by about $13,000. Since low-income households tend to spend a greater share of their incomes on highly regulated products, they bear the heaviest burden.
Progressives can help break the symbiotic relationship between special interests and overregulation. Indeed, they’ve often been the first to identify the problem.
Writing a century ago in his book “The New Freedom,” President Woodrow Wilson warned that “regulatory capture” would grow as government itself grew: “If the government is to tell big businessmen how to run their business, then don’t you see that big businessmen have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don’t you see that they must capture the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it?”
The capture Wilson warned of took root. By the early 1970s, progressive consumer advocates Mark Green and Ralph Nader were noting that “regulated industries are often in clear control of the regulatory process.” The problem was so acute that President Jimmy Carter tapped economist Alfred Kahn to do something about it.
In his research, Kahn meticulously showed that when “a [regulatory] commission is responsible for the performance of an industry, it is under never completely escapable pressure to protect the health of the companies it regulates.” As head of the Civil Aeronautics Board, Kahn moved to dismantle regulations that sustained anti-consumer airline cartels. Then he helped abolish the board altogether.
Liberals such as Nader and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) supported the move. Kennedy’s top committee lawyer, future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, later noted that the only ones opposed to deregulation were regulators and industry executives.
Their reform efforts unleashed competitive forces in aviation that had previously been impossible, opening up airline routes, lowering fares and increasing options for consumers.
It’s an embarrassing truth for both Democrats and Republicans that none of Carter’s successors, including Ronald Reagan, have pushed back as much as he did against the regulatory state.
Trump faces an uphill battle. He’ll stand a better chance if progressives acknowledge once again that lower-income Americans stand to gain from deregulation.
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“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
