This is what you get when you support a modern liberal state. It's always going to over-extend and over-regulate, because that's just the way the bureaucracy works - it's preserving itself by always finding new areas of society and the economy that "just have to be regulated for the common good".
It's a matter of basic principles, really. It's just never going to end unless you stand up for individual freedoms and very limited powers of the state.
This is what you get when you support markets and capital over people.
You NEED a government to regulate for the common good, or else your individual freedoms will be happily dispensed with by the market as it seeks to further extract additional surplus value from your labor and profit as much as it can from your existence. The market is a greedy bitch and does not care about your freedom. Limited powers of the state mean you will take on the market yourself. You will lose everything.
Overextend != over-regulate. The former is the action of the ruling class on behalf of the market to protect capital and increase its spheres of influence. The latter is the action of the ruling class attempting to placate the people, sanctioned for a time by the market so as to bide time until the people forget why the regulation was created in the first place (so a couple generatons later, the capitalists can spin a yarn that the regulation should go and nobody knows any longer how royally they fucked things up to necessitate the regulation in the first place).
What if they had regulations limiting the judges oversight? What if there was a regulation that restricted evidence accepted from corporations? What if there was a regulation that allowed for some kind of process of appeal in these situations?
You appear to be forcing your black and white political ideals onto something that is a little more complex that "Regulation Bad! Market Good!"
This is not complex at all. As long as new legislation concerning formerly unregulated areas of life is as easily introduced as today, and politics having as close a connection with money as it has, this is just not going to end, ever.
Good luck fighting the good fight, you're going to need it. The problem is a few meta-levels above.
People who still believe in politics in the US tend to attach themselves to "liberal" or "conservative" and use the other one as a pejorative. Neither term has a very well defined meaning, other than for a few select issues like, say, gay marriage.
> Neither term has a very well defined meaning, other than for a few select issues like, say, gay marriage.
Not really. I'm conservative in that I don't think that being radical will ever help your cause (see the French Revolution). I'm liberal in that I think people should be able to do whatever the hell they want with their lives (i.e., classical liberalism. It follows that I don't support excessive government interference, regulation, or social programs, so I wouldn't go on about being liberal, as that's what the U.S. Democrats have used to describe their platform (which isn't liberal in the traditional sense).
For the record, the government doesn't need to regulate marriage whatsoever. Obviously they want to know for tax purposes, but they shouldn't care about the genders of the people involved. Churches can say whatever they want about marriage, I don't really care, and I don't think gay people do either.
Note that in each of your uses of the terms L & C, you had to qualify them with a specific context. In each of those contexts, there's someone else who might use the term differently but sensibly. E.g., "radical conservatism", "contemporary liberalism".
My point being that the terms L & C are not by themselves sufficient to communicate intelligently, so when you hear them used without supporting context, the speaker is often not working from a solid logical basis.
Because the progressives won with FDR. Both parties are socialist now. Both are in favor of expanding the reach of the state in the market. We gave away the cake long ago and argue over the crumbs.
This is what you get when you support a modern liberal state. It's always going to over-extend and over-regulate, because that's just the way the bureaucracy works - it's preserving itself by always finding new areas of society and the economy that "just have to be regulated for the common good".
It's a matter of basic principles, really. It's just never going to end unless you stand up for individual freedoms and very limited powers of the state.