Anyone who says “regulation is bad” is attacking the problem with too blunt an instrument.

I agree.

The urge to get rid of regulations is either driven by corrupt profiteering or by an ideology that’s too crude for the real world.

It might also be driven by the feeling that it hits your enemy more than it hits you, but that was back then. Now it doesn't, because the enemy has converted their regulations into real-world power and can scrap them all and still have it.

BTW, I agree about "too crude", actually ancap as it is itself doesn't pretend to be anything else. That's why I like it very much - most cases of marxism etc are directed at some imagined and idealized real world, or a miraculous solution allowing to introduce them in the wild and let them work. Ancap (just like left anarchism) explored mechanisms which can never be made 100% pure in reality, but benefit everyone when created. It's more about designing new social systems than about ruining existing ones.

Which is why I don't like people making an association between ancap and Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand is a fan of monopolies and hereditary oligarchy. Ancap in its pure form has no levers for an oligarchy to maintain itself. It defines finite non-human-created resources as common, so its treatment of oligarchy is no different than left anarchism's treatment of oligarchy.

Getting back to regulations, I've recently had a wonderfully simple idea which doesn't even seem that crappy. Separate all law into the constitutional part (and maybe some intermediate kind requiring longevity and not too complex) and the usual part, and scrap the latter and start anew with a bunch of referendums every 10 years. One can devise a system where representatives are elected into councils (ranked choice voting, proportional system), a few dozens of them with a few hundreds people in each, and each council decides on its own part of the laws (of course, using advice of invited lawyers and such), and then a referendum approves or rejects those projects. Where those are rejected, the process is repeated until there's an acceptable variant.

To make the laws used in daily life simpler and more democratic. Right now malicious parties can slowly skew laws in their favor over many decades. In such a system only the popular perception and shared knowledge will survive those many decades, while the actual law will be decided upon democratically. Thus a solution to one time's problem won't become a problem for another time. And the legal corpus will be compact, similar to that of western countries in 1950s.

A lot of today's problems is just legal legacy and sneakery. This way stuff that's obsolete and stuff that has been sneaked in won't have any effect on modern application of rights.

Soviet elites' idea of power meant that.

USSR in late 1980s sort of "resurrected" the Soviet system as something kinda democratic (well, democratic centralism is not exactly that, but decisions were made, and many true words were said, and the resulting course of action those elites didn't like), so those elites (Yeltsin was a Politburo member, a reminder) just decided to flip the board.

But yeah, I definitely think there's a connection.

And while considering them all-powerful may be wrong, Soviet propaganda had more levels than people thought. The fact that the narrative of many of those dissidents then is now similar to the narrative of ex-Soviet elites and their allies speaks for itself.

The "visible" propaganda had different layers for kolkhozniks and for factory workers and for engineers and for artists. Everyone thought they could read between the lines, but that was too just a layer.

After USSR "collapsed", plenty of sects and ideologies emerged, and mostly those too were defined by Soviet propaganda - from political (sincere, not like those participating in the election, but like Limonov people and Makashov people and anarchists and communists, all of them) to esoteric (I don't even want to list all of that), and of course the church.

And now the Russian population is slowly transitioning from intoxication with that cocktail right to dissociation like with PTSD.

So why did they decide to flip the board?

Because only fools think that covert and conspiracy-minded and backstage and back alley actions are more true and sincere, or even stupider - advantageous for the weaker side. That's exactly where smoke and mirrors work flourishes. The truest thing Soviet people had was the common public "official" set of institutions and rules, no matter how disgusting it was. By flipping the board they removed it, and the masses had no common point of reality anymore.

So, why did I write this - yes. I think that's what these people are doing in the USA, except the many-layered genius-class propaganda system is not existent there, but a few companies have been working hard for 20 years to create some kind of replacement.