Ignorance: Blaming Deregulation For an Explosion in One of the Most Regulated Economies in the World

Some people like to blame the lack of regulation and statist control for disasters like the one in Tianjin, China, in which over 100 people died in a chemical explosion. This is to assume that 1) there was a regulation against storing those dangerous chemicals together and 2) it was subsequently eliminated.

As Manufacturing Industry Adviser puts it:

In China, there are an overwhelming number of measures to govern almost all aspects of the process of manufacturing a product, bringing that product to market, and maintaining that product’s integrity and competitiveness in the marketplace.

And it appears that there was a law against the practices of the Tianjin factory that put the entire region at risk. CNN reports:

Official news agency Xinhua said the company was licensed to handle dangerous chemicals at the time of the blasts but only obtained that license in June. A previous license had lapsed in October 2014.

CNN also reports that executives are being investigated for “severe violation of discipline and law”.

The people who make this claim no doubt think that the US has been deregulating since the ’70s when in fact the number of pages in the federal register just keeps on climbing:

There has been deregulation in China, but it’s been limited to the financial sector and mainly in the relaxation of interest rates. According to The World Economic Freedom Index, China is still well below the World average in business freedom including regulation.

Clearly, this isn’t a result of deregulation but straight up incompetence. Like Chernobyl and the Valdez and BP oil spills, deregulation had nothing to do with the catastrophe. Either the regulators couldn’t do their job or the corrupt system allowed for an uneven enforcement of their regulations, but corruption isn’t the same as deregulation and in fact the more regulation a country has, the more susceptible it is to corruption. If anything, one could say that over-regulation (of the wrong things) led to this disaster.