One is that the campaign for auto safety wound up destroying General Motors. On the eve of the Ribicoff hearings, Whyte tells us, G. In addition, G. The company maintained a landscaped suburban research campus, designed by Eero Saarinen.
Today, G. For Whyte, this is part of a broader tale of decline: in his view, the United States went from having a mainly unregulated economy to having a heavily regulated one—so much so that the country lost its ability to thrive. The regulatory state expanded into food, cosmetics, credit instruments, packaging and advertising, monopolies and pricing practices, and air and water pollution.
Other accounts emphasize that G. Whyte gives little or no credence to any of these explanations, because he sees G. This raises an immediate question: how could safety regulations have destroyed General Motors but not, say, Toyota and Honda, which also had to comply with the regulations in order to sell cars in the American market? Thomas K. Nader himself was a public supporter of several of these deregulatory efforts.
Later, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presented themselves as friends of deregulation. The reason that we are now in the early stages of a great debate about regulating the Internet is that a quarter century ago just about everyone, including liberals, assumed that an unregulated Internet would be a good idea. So did Nader usher in an era of regulation or one of deregulation?
The puzzle arises because regulation—government telling business what to do, or, anyway, what not to do—can take many forms. Most government regulation has focussed on other concerns. The very first federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, created in and laid to rest in , was intended to put railroads under a degree of government control, in order to protect not consumers but other businesses from being gouged.
There was regulation to promote competition, to control prices, to prevent the failure of essential businesses, to buttress certain business sectors, to compel businesses to attend to the public interest, to create a stable set of players in one or another industry—and, even back then, to protect consumers.
Although conservatives constantly accused the New Deal of representing a socialistic takeover of the private economy, its authors typically saw themselves as saviors of capitalism: giving the government greater economic power was a way of fending off the threats posed both by fascism and by communism. It was a celebration of this kind of arrangement as the foundation of a good society.
Galbraith had worked as a government price regulator during the Second World War. He and his many organizations consistently criticized regulatory agencies that effectively protected existing business arrangements instead of focussing on consumers.
Share this page Follow Ballotpedia. What's on your ballot? Jump to: navigation , search. What is an influencer? Categories : National influencers Activists Progressive influencers Labor policy influencers Environmental policy influencers. Voter information What's on my ballot? Where do I vote? How do I register to vote? How do I request a ballot? When do I vote? When are polls open? Who Represents Me? Congress special elections Governors State executives State legislatures Ballot measures State judges Municipal officials School boards.
How do I update a page? Election results. In this classic of muckraking journalism, Nader criticized the auto industry for putting style and power over safety and questioned the federal government's lax attitude on regulation. In particular, Nader cited the Chevrolet Corvair as a poorly designed automobile and produced convincing evidence that a driver could lose control of the vehicle even at slow speeds. Unsafe also promoted the philosophy regarding government regulation of an industry that has guided Nader's efforts ever since: Economic interests, which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology, need to be controlled.
The company sent investigators to harass Nader and make menacing phone calls to his friends and family. Private investigators spied on his activities and attempted to discredit him by allegedly luring him into compromising situations with women.
Senate hearings on auto safety. After repeated questioning and admonishments by committee members, GM chief James Roche publicly apologized for any alleged wrongdoing but denied that GM had tried to trap Nader in any lurid activities. This law created the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which oversees federal safety standards for automobiles and is authorized to impose recalls for unsafe vehicles.
In , in a throwback to Upton Sinclair , Nader also initiated a campaign that led to the passage of the Wholesome Meat Act, which imposed federal standards on slaughterhouses. In the late s and mids, Nader mobilized college students to form Public Interest Research Groups PIRG , which aided his investigations in public policy and effective government regulation.
His professional associates, sometimes referred to derisively as "Nader's Raiders," published reports on a wide range of subjects, including baby food, insecticides, mercury poisoning and coal-mine safety. Idealistic and modest, he became known among his associates for his Spartan personal habits and long working hours. However, in the s, President Ronald Reagan dismantled many of the government regulations that Nader helped establish.
While this blunted his effectiveness for a time, Nader continued his crusades to lower car insurance rates in California, expose the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons CFCs on the ozone layer and prevent limitations on consumer lawsuit rewards.
Stepping even further into the world of politics, Nader ran for president in every election from to In all of them, he operated a no-frills campaign, accepting no corporate or taxpayer money. In , claiming he could see no difference between Republican candidate George W.
The election turned out to be one of the closest in American history between the two major party candidates. Gore ultimately lost the election, and Nader was accused of having taken support away from him in several key states, especially Florida, where Gore lost by votes.
0コメント