Story highlights Andrew Koppelman: Executive order "Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Cost," speaks the language of principled libertarians

But its beneficiaries are people and companies that pursue their own gain at the expense of the public, he says

Andrew Koppelman is the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) Republicans are friendly to business and suspicious of regulations. They want minimal government as a matter of principle. But there is another group that wants to shrink government: professional criminals who hate cops. They want no interference when they hurt people.

President Trump's recent executive order, titled "Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Cost," speaks the language of the principled libertarians, but its beneficiaries are likely to be the thugs.

Andrew Koppelman

The order prohibits any agency from issuing any new regulation unless it also repeals two regulations that cost as much as the new one. "Costs" mean the cost of complying with the regulation. The harms that were the reason for the regulation don't count at all.

David Dana and Michael Barsa observe the implications of Trump's order. The Department of Interior created a set of new regulations in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, in which BP spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest marine oil spill in history, and, Dana and Barsa wrote, it cost "nearly $9 billion for lost fisheries and $23 billion for lost tourism, not to mention the catastrophic effects on marine life and birds. Yet under the president's order, the only costs that matter are those to the oil companies. Costs to the public and to the environment are completely ignored." The regulations aren't cheap; the cost to the industry has been estimated at hundreds of millions. But that's peanuts compared to the costs of another spill.

Trump is a big fan of Ayn Rand. Like her fictional hero John Galt in "Atlas Shrugged," he wants to free business from the heavy hand of government. But this is an oddly distorted libertarianism, in which Rand's villains masquerade as her heroes: those who talk most of liberty are the looters and moochers.

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