James B. Shearer – Or you wind up with liberals arguing against conservative positions nobody is advocating or constructing fields of blazing straw men.

James B. Shearer – How is that similar to lowering costs through government regulation, the topic of this thread?

I answered the question asked. In general evaluating government depends on what you are comparing to. Compared to no government at all lots of what government does (like maintaining law and order) looks pretty good. Compared to some hypothetical ideal government actual governments (not surprisingly) are less impressive.

In my view the role of government is to provide an environment in which private enterprise can flourish. Some regulation is inevitable (and in fact desirable). Conservatives should (in my opinion at least) try to avoid blind opposition to all regulation and instead try to make regulation more consistent with conservative principles. Otherwise you just end up letting liberals write the rules.

The changes in trucking regulation cited above are an example of this. Trucking is of course still heavily regulated.

There are some utterly wretched corners, e.g., Chicago, San Francisco, but LBJ had a winner in the Interstate.

askeptic – Trucking deregulation did materially lower costs for shippers in the early 1980s.

James B. Shearer – How is that similar to lowering costs through government regulation, the topic of this thread?