This chapter challenges the idea that rural communities have “declined.” It argues that the term, “decline,” discounts how laws and policies have actively facilitated rural marginalization and socioeconomic distress for decades. “Decline” reframes an active phenomenon as one that occurred passively, making current rural challenges seem natural and inevitable. The chapter assesses how twentieth- and twenty-first-century federal and state laws and policies undermined traditional rural livelihoods in agriculture, natural resource and energy development, and manufacturing. The chapter then provides a legal history of transportation and telecommunications deregulation, and the role deregulation played in exacerbating geographic inequality. Overall, the chapter proposes that instead of declining, rural communities have been undermined, as policymakers have consciously traded rural welfare for some other perceived benefit. While those trade-offs may have afforded tangible societal benefits in some fashion, the decline framing discounts how rural communities were in fact knowingly sacrificed in the name of the greater good.

The Deal New regulated banks, transportation, and energy among other industries, in the 1930s. In the 1970s, there was a mostly bipartisan effort to reduce regulation in those industries. Although Ronald Reagan is known as the deregulation president, it was Jimmy Carter that started deregulation in each of those industries. Alfred Kahn, whom Carter appointed to lead the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), together with recently retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, advised Senator Ted Kennedy on how to deregulate airlines. The deregulation of truck, railroad, bus, and transportation, along with natural gas deregulation, followed. Deregulation was based on policy evidence that changes in those industries made it possible to lessen regulation and depend on markets to achieve greater efficiencies. By comparison, Congress decision to reduce regulation of savings and loan banks, based on industry lobbying, ended in disaster as S&Ls failed because of risky behavior and Congress had to bail them out. On balance, the regulation that occurred rebalanced the mix of government and markets in order to achieve a more robust economy.

The efforts of academics, conservative think tanks, and political leaders on emphasizing markets and reducing government paid off after the election of President Ronald Reagan, which resulted in a new mix of government and markets, although not to the extent that many proponents of small government favored. There have been additional legal procedures and political oversight, which has made it more difficult to regulate some markets; government services have been outsourced, and government spending on regulation and social welfare has been reduced. Bill Clinton, influenced by the anti-government mood in the county, supported deregulation of telecommunications, welfare, and banking, but Congress reversed the banking deregulation after a Wall Street collapse in 2008 and was forced to spend billions of dollars to save the economy. Despite the anti-government mood, nearly all the laws and programs established in the New Deal and Great Society eras have remained on the books and have not been repealed. Besides the bailout, there were some other significant expansions of government including most notably the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obama Care.

This chapter addresses challenges to the KWV system as the overall surplus spiralled in the 1980s and cooperatives began offloading cheap wine onto the market in minimalist packaging. Independent producers and the SFW became increasingly critical of the KWV’s performance of its regulatory functions. The chapter provides an account of Tim Hamilton-Russell’s dogged campaign for the right to produce wine in the Hemel-en-Aarde and to market it as he saw fit. It also addresses the vine-smuggling scandal that broke in 1986, which culminated in the loosening of quarantine controls. The chapter then details how the end of white rule led to government scrutiny of the KWV. After a bitter struggle over the demands of the KWV to hold onto its assets as it converted to a private company, a political deal was struck that enabled part of them be reycled in support of a black empowerment agenda in the industry. The residual control functions were taken over by a set of new bodies. The chapter closes with a brief account of the arrival of international drinks companies and the full merger between Distillers and SFW to create Distell, in an effort to ward off potentially hostile competition.

Methadone, a medication used to treat opioid use disorder (OUD), has resulted in decreased opioid overdose deaths, while increasing treatment retention and lowering the rates of infectious diseases associated with intravenous substance use. Access to methadone is limited in the United States due to federal laws and regulatory policies that are rooted in racist “criminal justice approaches” to substance use. Unlike other controlled prescription medications, methadone is subject to restrictions on the number of doses a person can receive at any given time, known as “take-home doses” (THDs). Federal regulations mandate that patients receiving methadone must travel to government-certified clinics known as opioid treatment programs (OTPs) almost daily to receive medication for at least the first 90 days of treatment. Due to the need to practice social distancing during COVID-19, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) – the regulatory agency which sets the accreditation standards for OTPs – released a federal waiver in March 2020 granting significant exemptions to THD regulations. Thousands of patients have now received increased THDs, a historic and impactful shift in care for people with OUD. This chapter begins with an overview of the regulation of methadone for OUD before COVID-19. Next, it reviews the evidence for regulatory reform alongside our analysis of qualitative data we collected during COVID-19 that reflects patients’ experiences with increased access to THDs. Based on the findings of our qualitative study and the empirical literature, we conclude the chapter with recommendations for modifications of THD regulations.

Discusses alternatives to traditional economic regulation, including competition for the market, contestability, state ownership, reliance on competition law, deregulation and negotiated agreements

This chapter demonstrates that the lower degree of and narrower scope of the perceived strategic value of labor-intensive, non-value-added sectors, represented by textiles, for national security and resource management, has shaped their decentralization beginning under Gorbachev’s perestroika. Mass privatization after Soviet breakdown further reenforced the private governance pattern dominant in apparel and clothing. The cross-time sector and company case studies disclose the interacting strategic value and sectoral logics and show apparel and clothing factories have shut down or privatized to former managers only to languish with antiquated equipment. Today, Russian textile and garment manufacturers are outcompeted by illegal imports from China and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Industrial and technical textile sectors, which incorporate oil and petrochemicals and higher technological intensity, in contrast, experience the state intervention from central and regional governments of decentralized governance in response to political and economic pressures, such as oil boom and bust cycles and Western sanctions in post-Crimea annexation. The central government has designated petrochemicals a critical input for chemical fiber processing and provides fiscal incentives to develop technical textiles. Local governments have worked with local and national oligarchs to revive factories and production lines, and courted foreign direct investment.

The creation of an internal market that transcends all Member States has without doubt been the EU’s priority in the last sixty years. Conceptualising Europe as a market, however, requires a careful appreciation of how its economic objectives and its political objectives intersect. This chapter will focus on exactly this. We analyse what the different available methods of market integration, and their subsequent implications, tell us about the nature of the EU’s market. Which institutions have power, and why? What is the balance between economic interests and other values, and is that balance appropriate? In this chapter, we analyse the many parts to the puzzle that is the internal market. We will then focus on the two main regulatory techniques of the internal market: positive integration, through which the EU re-regulates the European market by the creation of new legislation and negative integration, which takes place where national rules governing the market are declared inapplicable as they impede the functioning of the internal market. Each of these regulatory techniques, as we will see, comes with its own assumptions, problems and implications.

Trump’s America First Energy Plan, which focuses on oil and gas expansion and rolling back regulations, promised to insulate the US economy from the volatile global oil market. In reality, the US shale oil industry, operating within the global oil markets, suffered contractions when oil supplier nations’ price wars caused global oil prices to crash. While the plan promised to bring Americans jobs and prosperity, predicating economic development on oil and gas extraction is a dubious strategy for several reasons. The shale industry, which contributed to the recent boom and expected future production, suffers from a shaky financial foundation. Even prior to COVID-19, traditional investors had begun cutting lending to shale companies and bankruptcies were accelerating. In March 2020, under Congress’s COVID-19 financial rescue package, the Trump administration executed a bailout for the oil and gas industry that shifted financial losses to American taxpayers without securing companies’ agreements to keep workers employed. The bailout replicates the decades-long economic model of the industry, which privatizes profits to the companies, while socializing the costs from the industry, through tax preferences and subsidies for the industry and through various laws that favor extraction over those that suffer from the industry’s adverse impacts.

Economists are, at best, skeptical of politicians who trumpet industrial policies; they point to their failures in this country and abroad. They wish the politicians’ electoral mantra was “Growth, growth, growth,” not “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” They believe the focus on jobs leads to subsidies for declining industries where there are lots of workers and voters rather than for industries of the future, where there are few. Economic growth and higher standards of living inevitably mean that employment patterns will change over decades.

Even left-of-center economists love markets. For example, in their introductory economics textbook, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and his wife Robin Wells say: “Markets are an amazingly effective way to organize economic activity.” By shrinking profits, and, in their wake, workforces, markets help societies create workforces with better-paying jobs.

Most economists, however, support government interventions to combat the monopolistic power of firms and to support some standards of safety for workers. An increasing number would support raises in the minimum wage. Nevertheless, economists strongly oppose the rapid increase in the licensing of occupations as well as many other regulations imposed on firms.

When we think about “regulation” – that is, a sustained and focused control mechanism over valuable activities, using rule setting, rule monitoring and rule enforcement – the first image that comes to mind is a public administrative agency. However, over the past three decades, private entities have gradually assumed greater and greater regulatory roles. When we send our children to schools, the quality of education as well as their safety and health are often monitored by private auditors. When they are sick and must be taken to an emergency room, the standards of treatment are in many hospitals determined by a private organization. When we buy them a toy, it is usually a product made by workers in developing countries whose labor conditions are evaluated by a nonprofit organization, and in factories whose environmental standards are defined by a private industry association.