Overregulation is regressive

What does it mean to be regressive? There are two primary views on this. One is that you are pushing society backwards. The other is that you are inhibiting progress.

A lot of people insist that Democrats are progressive. I'm not among them. Democrats have a history of promoting all kinds of legislation that impacts our lives. This creates over-regulation that can inhibit progress. This is the primary reason that I view Democrats as regressive.

It's pretty obvious that creating laws that say you must do things one way prohibits finding a better way of doing things. I'm not going to go into detail on how that's regressive. Instead, I want to discuss some of the oversights.

Here in Washington, we passed a sex ed law that gave the state nearly total control over sex ed. The purpose of this law was to control the curriculum within context of the conventional schooling model. Mandating conventional schooling wasn't the purpose, but you have to embrace that model to be in compliance.

What if a school wanted to move away from set curriculum? This awful law wouldn't allow that approach because the law sets the curriculum. Keep in mind that the people creating the curriculum have never met each student that will be subjected to it. This law prevents schools from deviating from the set curriculum. Since different children have drastically different needs, it's legitimately impossible for any school that even does an adequate job of meeting individual needs to be in compliance with this law. If a school even tries, they will end up in violation of this law.

Another underlying problem is that the law identifies children by grade. Even if you believe in strictly tying age to sex ed, this creates obvious problems. They are identifying curriculum by grade rather than age. If a school stopped this disastrous policy of diminishing children to rigid age-based groupings, they would not be in compliance with this law. This is even true if they group students into age groups for only this one subject.

When laws are built around what we are already doing, even if it's not the purpose of the law, they are preventing alternative approaches from emerging. We have a serious educational crisis on our hands, but our state has effectively prohibited us from finding a better way.

This isn't just about education. Whenever the government over-regulates, they further entrench us in the status quo. We can't pursue any alternatives to better the situation.

Another good example of this is sports. I have long insisted that parks and recreation is the logical lead for sports programs. We generally treat schools as the lead. School-aged children usually have more taxpayer-funded sports resources than the bulk of the population. There are laws relating to expectations of schools relating to sports. This can complicate transitioning to parks and recreation. There are also considerations that make it difficult to transition that funding from schools to parks and recreation. Over-regulation is an enormous obstacle to a change that I view as vital to addressing the obesity crisis.

Our country is clearly on the wrong path. Republicans aren't doing anything to fix our problems. The Democrats have been pushing us further down that path. I definitely consider the Democrats to be the more regressive of the two major parties. Even if you disagree with me on that point, it's the Democrats who have created an environment that makes it nearly impossible to pursue the changes we need. The single biggest thing we can do for progress in this country is deregulate. Unfortunately, we are going in the exact opposite direction.