By the mid-1970s, the federal government had set up a vast array of consumer protections, put in place and administered by various bureaucratic agencies, such as the FDA, EPA, OSHA, and many others, in many areas critical to social health and well-being. Yet by the time George W. Bush left the presidency in 2009, regulations in many of these areas had been significantly weakened. Regulations had been scaled back, budgets of regulatory agencies slashed, and administrators apparently reluctant to pursue new regulations, or even to enforce existing regulations, to protect the consumer.

Freedom to Harm: The Lasting Legacy of the Laissez Faire Revival by Thomas McGarity examines the decline in regulatory protection, from the time of the Reagan administration to the end of the Bush II presidency, in the areas of worker safety, environmental protection, drug and medical-device safety, food safety, transportation safety, financial protection, consumer protection, and civil justice (tort reform).

McGarity's argument is an interesting one. Through three time periods, the early 1980s and the beginnings of the Reagan administration, in 1995 and 1996, right after the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress, and in the 2000s and the early part of the Bush II administration, a combination of conservative think tanks, university faculty (especially at the University of Chicago schools of Law and Economics), and talk radio combined to put pressure on the federal government to dismantle the regulatory protections put in place in three waves—the consumer protections put in place during the Progressive Era of the early 1900s (that saw the creation of the USDA, the Bureau of the Mines, etc.), the New Deal program of the 1930s (which created many protections in the banking and financial industries), and the Public Interest Era of the 1970s Nixon administration which saw the creation of the likes of OSHA and the EPA.

The key to the successes of this cabal, according to McGarity, was money. He traces the money back to the very beginnings of what he refers to as the “laissez faire revival” in the 1940s, coinciding with the publication of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom (35). The views put forth by Hayek were exactly what the like-minded people running the Volker Fund wanted to push on the public. So, they offered to front Hayek's salary to any university in the United States that would put him on their faculty, which the University of Chicago did (36). The Volker Fund was the first of a long list of “founding funders” (including the likes of the Olin Foundation, Joseph Coors, and the Koch family), which was made up of wealthy, conservative businessmen and foundations. These “founding funders,” especially after Barry Goldwater's 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson, supported conservative think tanks and endowed chairs at universities around the country to propagate the idea of the laissez-faire minimalism of the Gilded Age (37).

As a result of the backing of the “founding funders,” other organizations sprang up, such as the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, and others that lent their voices to the cry for laissez-faire minimalism. Citizen-based groups, such as Americans for Tax Reform and Chambers of Commerce, and the growing phenomenon of talk radio (with the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh) also did their part to influence the public toward the idea that less government regulation, and hence more freedom for big business, was a good thing for the country.

What was the result? Developments in the Nixon and Ford presidencies made it more difficult for agencies to promulgate regulations because of the requirement to perform cost-benefit analyses (69). The media, during the Carter administration, began to push horror stories of overzealous bureaucrats and unnecessary regulations (70). The Reagan administration saw the first wave of deregulation (71). The Bush I administration created the Council on Competitiveness, which pushed for deregulation, while at the same time signing the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (74, 75). The Clinton administration seemed more interested in reinventing government and placating the newly resurgent Republican Party than in strengthening regulation (75). The Bush II administration saw the passage of legislation that weakened regulations and cut agency budgets (80–83). All this led to a necessarily much-weakened regulatory environment by the time Barack Obama and the Democrats took office in 2009.

Obama came into office giving much hope to the supporters of increased consumer protections. While long on hope and promises in this area, his administration has not lived up to them. “President Obama was not committed to bringing about fundamental change in the relationship between business and government” (234). His fight to get national health-care legislation passed cost him much political capital, and when the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2010, there seemed to be little hope of much happening in this area.

McGarity's work is interesting and should be of some value to the reader in the general public. His narrative of the growth and development of these regulatory protections is excellent. He develops early in the book a theoretical framework, which he ultimately abandons, that would have tightened his argument further. He also provides some interesting remedies in the last chapter for those who would like to see more government regulation.

But ultimately, the book fails at its supposed premise. Rather than being a tightly constructed argument, the book definitely reads as a polemic. Strategically placed quotation marks (such as when he speaks of conservative “intellectuals”), and the general anticonservative tone of the author, will make the book a hard read for any who may disagree with his argument.

The book is also lacking in several other areas. There are factual mistakes and omissions. He gives scant attention to the Carter administration's complicity in the push for deregulation. The author states the Interstate Commerce Commission was abolished in the late 1970s (148) when it was actually 1996. He refers to the Brookings Institution as one of the right-leaning think tanks that helped to pressure the relaxing of regulations, when Brookings has always been considered a centrist or slightly left-of-center organization (53). He attributes Obama's victory in 2008 to voters’ yearning for stiffer regulations on the economy (234), but polls showed those sentiments were but a minor reason. And when discussing the financial meltdown of 2007, he barely mentions the role of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac. These omissions and the overall tone of the book are unfortunate, for without them the book would have a much broader appeal.