Walter Russell Mead:

Heavy regulation plus bad governance hurts the poor and prevents jobs from being created in big blue cities where so many immigrants and minorities live. Those are exactly the people who most need the freedom to start businesses, and those are the businesses our existing blue model cities do so much to crush.

Many of these regulations and bureaucratic obstacles, moreover, serve no social purpose. As Yglesias’ experience shows, the move for government reform does not need to be an ideological or partisan issue: liberals should fight pointless, expensive, poor-exploiting and opportunity-killing regulation as hard as conservatives.

But it has, to some degree, become a partisan issue because upper middle class progressive intellectuals often know nothing about the real effect of the regulations they do so much to promote. The reason for this is simple: they are almost never in the position of running businesses.

via Slate’s Matt Yglesias Sings the Blue Model Blues | Via Meadia.

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