You probably know all about that era of U.S. history when the federal government went all laissez-faire and repealed most of the regulations governing Americans, cutting away vast swathes of the red tape which bound U.S. businesses and individuals, freeing them from the control of politicians and government bureaucrats and making way for unbridled capitalism.
That was the famous “Era of Deregulation”, of course. In the 21st Century all of media and academia —even on the right side of the political spectrum — took it for granted that the Era of Deregulation was a real period in American history.
But did it really happen?
OVERREGULATED is a sort of detective story. We set out to find the Era of Deregulation and find instead that it is a work of fiction. The EoD was never a real period in U.S. history (although, surprisingly, a real EoD did happen in much of the rest of the world, as we show), but rather the U.S. EoD is a persistent and elaborate lie. A fiction very useful to the political left. By the end of this book, we will recount the story — the true biography — of the birth and life of the insidious EoD lie. But we also tell another story, about the truth.
That story is about what really happened to government regulation in the 20th Century, and what is happening to it in 21st. And it isn’t pretty. It’s pretty shocking really. It is the truth about the U.S. era of Overregulation. Which really did happen and continues to happen, and it is a shocking horror story. The parts about the zombie Glass-Steagall and the monstrous Dodd-Frankenstein alone will probably give you nightmares. But you really should know the truth behind the lies about the phony Era of Deregulation meme, don’t you think?
