Reform the administrative state or tear it down? Thoughts from Clyde Wayne Crews:
For the past couple of years I’ve been emphasizing the usefulness of an executive order from President Donald Trump on regulatory “guidance documents” to bridge the gap between the president's initial flurry of regulatory reform activity, and some hypothetical future congressional configuration that would make further permanent action on regulatory or administrative state streamlining possible. [...]
I have long thought and grown increasingly concerned that the classical liberal, conservative and libertarian movements spend too much time playing in a sandbox on the left’s vast administrative state beach, one where the progressives/interventionists set the terms. The task now is to create the body of knowledge and information demonstrating that the coercive administrative state does not and cannot work to safeguard liberty, rather than just try to “reform” it or “study” it. [...]
The aim, therefore, cannot be an ultimately futile “administrative state reform,” which will protect the administrative state; instead restoration of Article I is our real task. What is the liberty movement missing to get that done? We spend much of our time politely asking the left not to dismantle everything the Framers achieved with the Constitution.
Meanwhile, not to defend Republicans and their shortcomings, but the Democratic party is fully prepared, if one triumphs in its primaries, to nominate a socialist for president; meanwhile California is already a one-party state. Societal polarization and an influx of socialist politicians are the dominant realities today, and for socialists, the “validity” of their pet administrative state would not even rise to the level of afterthought. Yet we imagine we are challenging the administrative state in the face of that, somehow.
[Clyde Wayne Crews, “What If the Administrative State Cannot Be Reformed?” Forbes, May 13]
