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"Regulation" is a protean and potentially all-encompassing term: essentially every act of government aims to alter some course of events. A functional definition is that regulation is government prescription of terms and conditions of private transactions, usually in the form of rules written and enforced by specialized administrative agencies, in order to achieve some public result. That differentiates regulation from taxing and spending--but taxing and spending programs are replete with detailed specifications of how taxes are to be calculated and funds awarded, which like naked regulations are intended to alter private conduct. And, in the United States, the federal government applies numerous detailed grant conditions, and also "unfunded mandates," to state and local governments. Beyond the functional definition, regulation has at least two political meanings in the American context: government efforts to manage private markets and hence "free enterprise" and "capitalism," and federal government efforts to centralize power and policy-making within the federalist system. Ambiguities at the margin are unimportant in this paper: conservatism's dilemma with the growth of regulation has some unique features but is not fundamentally different from its dilemma with the growth of government tout court. . . .

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Christopher DeMuth is the D. C. Searle Senior Fellow at AEI.