Special Editorial/Dan Quayle: Saving George Bush from Himself
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Dan Quayle: Saving George Bush From Himself by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. How odd it is that our President sought digitalis for American trade by traveling halfway around the world to Japan. All he...
...Of preeminent importance are the Council's attempts to place caps on punitive settlements and to adopt the British practice of forcing plaintiffs to pick up defendants' bills in lost tort cases...
...Ronald Reagan bequeathed him a healthy country, enjoying the peaceful break-up of an Evil Empire and America's longest period of peacetime growth...
...It is to turn out products inoffensive to a wild and vaporous congregation of professional complainants: environmentalists, consumerists, preservationists, Christian Scientists, anti-Christian scientists, anti-science Christians, short people, fat people, the incontinent, people allergic to fragrances, people disturbed by loud noises—all the wondrous and querulous progeny of the most effective mutterer of all time, Ralph Nader...
...The culture's disesteem for Reaganite cost-benefit sticklers affected President Bush...
...So has that part of the 1988 Fair Housing Amendment (so-called) requiring all housing units covered by the act to include accommodations for the handicapped whether handicapped people live in them or not...
...He has expressed alarm erratically for three years, while the Competitiveness Council has actually done something, and always under the hostile gaze of Dick Darman, the country-club Republicans' chief Machiavel...
...There have also been such monsters as the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Act...
...It is a stronghold of all the knowledge achieved by studying economic stagnation over the past three decades...
...So it has clout...
...The culture presented Reaganites as unsavory right-wing ideologues and the President bought it...
...It is a bizarre spectacle, but as time ticks away on the Bush Administration I have come to the conclusion that there is something bizarre about this President...
...CI 14 The American Spectator March 1992...
...A 1989 edict, forcing all the Republic's municipal waste combusters to recycle 25 percent of their garbage and costing billions has been rolled back...
...He recognized the danger regulation posed to economic growth and got the President's agreement to have a Competitiveness Council in the government similar to Vice President Bush's Task Force on Regulatory Relief...
...and from his deputy, David M. McIntosh, co-founder of the luminous Federalist Society...
...We also know that justice must be done in the courts, but burdening the courts with nuisance suits only turns the process of law into an opportunity for venal trial lawyers to gouge productive citizens...
...They mire American commercial life in regulation and litigation, pursuant to a plenitude of noble ideals...
...The philosophical vacuums appointed by the President to head bureaucracies have turned him from being the consolidator of a conservative revolution intothe cat's-paw of the ancien regime...
...Their highest achievement is nothing more than the transferral of wealth from those who work to those who complain...
...The Council's influence will halve the time the FDA takes to approve drugs for life-threatening diseases...
...Rather than put these controversialists in charge of agencies and departments, the President stuck with those sunny, country-club Republicans who had given him loyalty if not intelligence...
...They have become the unchallenged sacred music of the Republic, with only a handful of critics bold enough to remind us that each promise carries its costs...
...Consequently, an increasing number of American institutions achieve nothing but muddle...
...Under President Bush the egregious Clean Air Act was only one of several dinosaurs set loose to roam across the back of the economy...
...He seemed to love the job...
...Things would be much worse were it not for the perspicuity of the Vice President...
...Now, we are told, the President is again alarmed about the spread of regulation...
...Given that his free marketeers have defensible ideas along with a record of achievement, and that the vacuums have no ideas, those are not bad odds...
...Thus the Competitiveness Council has proposed fifty civil justice reforms, many that will dissuade lawyers from attempting extravagant litigation, and some that will protect property rights from insensitive bureaucrats...
...Yet, as Terry Eastland notes in this issue, the council's work seems to be a rear guard action against the President's philosophical vacuums, who smile atop all the agencies of his government...
...More immediately, it has relaxed requirements for a time-consuming process of acquiring government permits for industrial plant modernization, and prevented government from asserting a dubious definition of "wetlands" that would take 100 million acres of perfectly usable land from the free commerce of the private sector...
...Some of their actions have had highly beneficial consequences...
...Nearly 4,900 federal regulations have been written by some 122,000 bureaucrats, more than were at work during the last stampede of regulation at the end of the Carter Administration...
...If industry fails, the "iron triangle" is ably supported by tens of thousands of trial lawyers, all handsomely paid whether they win their case or are laughed out of court...
...Gentleman that he is, he does seem to have a little hang-up about his predecessor, the man to whom he owes not only his office but also the early success of his Administration...
...Quayle is a conservative by birth who learned still more about conservatism in the 1980s...
...What raises the ire of the agents of the Iron Triangle...
...There are indeed thousands of such agents at work in the Republic at this very hour, probably hundreds of thousands...
...In mid-1990 the President recognized the growing regulatory explosion and turned to the Vice President to cut back unnecessary regulation and resolve disputes between regulatory agencies...
...The basis of all these ideas was high promises to everybody—promises to save the cities, promises to take care of the sick, the old, the universities...
...To begin with, the Council includes the Vice President, the White House chief of staff, the attorney general, the director of OMB, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and the secretaries of commerce and treasury...
...I thought we took care of that," the astonished President responded...
...Vice President Bush presided over President Reagan's Task Force on Regulatory Relief, predecessor to Vice President Quayle's Competitiveness Council...
...Free marketeers and advocates of a competitive America will review the work of the Competitiveness Council with approval...
...And that is only the cost of environmental regulation...
...The Federal Register abounds with arcana intruding into every aspect of American life...
...The costs have in recent years been offloaded onto industry, but the citizens eventually pay in higher prices, fewer jobs, and less consumer choice...
...We have been living through the reregulation of Washington, and it has cost the economy almost enough in terms of productivity to 12 The American Spectator March 1992 account for the present recession...
...American Liberalism has lost at presidential politics ever since, but it never lost its dominance in the culture...
...Maybe he sought their names and Prime Minister Miyazawa's promise that they would pack up their sushi, head back to Japan, and desist from frustrating American productivity, skewing our markets, and making America ever less competitive in the global economy...
...Consider American industry...
...n point of fact, all American institutions have been ordered to do more than they can possibly do, and frequently more than is possible...
...S ince the Reagan Administration shuffled out of Washington three years ago, the city has been on a regulation binge unmatched since the last days of the Carter grandeur...
...Relying on a body of legal and economic studies that has been expanding for The American Spectator March 1992 13 decades, the Council has attempted to make regulations reasonable and practical...
...It is to integrate women and minorities into the work force according to formulas that are at once complex, evasive, and subjective...
...Finally, it has eased regulatory processes that retard developments in the field of biotechnology...
...Hence the promises continue to echo through American society...
...In his policies he has furtively abandoned the Reagan legacy...
...They are bureaucrats, Capitol Hillstaffers, and lobbyists for the special pleaders, members of what Ronald Reagan in his December 1988 farewell address on domestic policy termed "the iron triangle...
...Its doughty band of free marketeers knows how to make the American economy competitive...
...Rather than read a week's supply of government regulations, most of us would prefer a stretch in solitary, the prison guards reading aloud, day and night, back issues of the New York Review of Books, the menu consisting solely of disgusting fruit juices and the kind of baby food prescribed by the country's health addicts...
...Their reregulating of Washington continues at a mighty pace...
...He kept a steely eye on bureaucratic marplots while our innocent President went around promising to become the "Education President" and the "Environmental President," apparently without recognizing the bureaucratic cost such promises entail...
...The number of proposed regulations has increased by nearly one-fourth since Ronald Reagan left government...
...Well, from mid-1990 on the Vice President has tried...
...As Newsweek noted in its January 6 issue, "Reagan appointed ideologues committed to deregulation, while Bush emphasized competence and personal friendships, sometimes without even inquiring about the nominee's philosophy of government...
...All he really had to do was walk into the office of his Vice President and acquaint himself with the work of his own Presidential Competitiveness Council...
...An 80-to-90 percent cleanup is desirable...
...It is not only supposed to turn out products that are competitive...
...But the promises issuing from George Bush for a moratorium on regulation are not particularly heartening...
...A 100-percent cleanup is economically prohibitive...
...The Council has revised a government regulation that would make banks responsible for cleaning up hazardous waste at properties on which the banks hold loans...
...The burden on the economy has been oppressive...
...During the Reagan Administration, free marketeers were brought into government to weigh the costs of regulation and litigation against the promised benefits...
...Last November the National Journal dubbed George Bush the "Regulatory President," observing that "despite President Bush's anti-regulatory rhetoric, his first term has witnessed the broadest expansion of government's regulatory reach since the early 1970s...
...Moreover it has an excellentexecutive director in Allan B. Hubbard, who managed the 1988 presidential campaign of that superb advocate of economic growth, former Delaware governor Pete du Pont...
...Scores of other noble causes are being advanced by regulators now untrammeled by Reagan's cost-benefit sticklers...
...it is now $123 billion and expected to reach $171 billion by the year 2000, with this year's Clean Air Act alone costing business $25 billion annually...
...they are now under investigation in no less than seven congressional committees...
...We know that the environment must be cleaned up, but we also know that repristinating it to an imagined premodern condition is absurd...
...And then there have been the thousands of leeches placed on the economy, regulations against noise, smells, useful drugs, unlabeled booze, smokers, meat eaters, economic producers, prudent lenders...
...but they are not paid by the Japanese government...
...But the patriots of the Competitiveness Council actually read all the pernicious bulls of the regulators and act...
...Incidentally, it was okay to take Iacocca to Japan, but to bring him back was inexplicable...
...Unfortunately he never learned from it...
...Yet President Bush, who was very much on the scene in those happy days, went to Japan with a begging cup and the gaseous Lee Iacocca...
...He was given a staff of six free marketeers on his Competitiveness Council to do battle with the aforementioned 122,000 bureaucrats...
...Here is but another of our President's recent miscalculations, reminding us that he takes the affectations of our politicized culture more seriously than he takes the ideas that got him elected...
...At the end of the Reagan Administration the annual estimated cost to business of environmental regulation was placed at $102 billion...
...Rather, as Vice President Dan Quayle will testify, they are Americans, and often very patriotic...
...By 1980 we had promised ourselves almost to the point of national bankruptcy...
...Surely one explanation for America's difficulty in competing in a global economy is that government forces its citizens to pursue too many noble ideals...
...Of course, there is always the possibility that the President suspects that America's competitiveness is threatened by Japanese secret agents...
...He is an uncritical consumer of our politicized culture, buying into most of its sacred promises, no matter how inimical to the politics that got him elected...
...The doggedness of the regulators is a perfect example of how a politicized culture thwarts the presidency...
...For eight years that knowledge contributed to the Reaganite revival of the American economy...
...If they were innocent of the ideas that made the Reagan Administration one of the most successful of this century, so what...
...In President Bush's Christmas message to Americans on the Cold War, he did not even mention Ronald Reagan's name...
...A decade back, Theodore H. White explained Liberalism's 1980 electoral de-bade thus: "The election 'of 1980 marked the rejection of a whole system of ideas that dominated American life ever since early 1960...
...That they have put together an effective engine of enlightened policy is clear...
...There is something very small in a man who cannot acknowledge the greatness of a predecessor now safely retired, and when that smallness leads to the setbacks that the Bush Administration has sustained in recent months, one is reminded that the greatest asset for a statesman is not intellect or guile but character...
...Periodically, President Bush would note the accumulating red tape and sound an amazed alarm...
...The staff members of the Competitiveness Council have not been anesthetized by the stupefacient language of government regulation...
Vol. 25 • March 1992 • No. 3
