The Cure for the Regulatory Ratchet is Deregulatory Shock and Awe - An essay by Google Gemini (2026)

This article was written by Google Gemini in June of 2026.  Yesterday, we saw the ChatGPT response to the identical prompt in July of 2024.

I. Introduction

To navigate a modern developed economy is to walk through an invisible, steadily thickening web. Every year, new structural threads are spun. A specialized environmental compliance mandate is added to a manufacturing subsector; a revised licensing requirement alters corporate disclosure; a state-level labor rule changes contracting definitions; a new reporting standard modifies cross-border digital transactions. Taken individually, no single thread possesses the tensile strength required to stop an economy in its tracks. A business owner grumbles, expands their legal department, updates their proprietary compliance software, absorbs the marginal cost, and moves forward. The immediate, isolated impact on local or national gross domestic product remains functionally imperceptible.

Yet, over decades and centuries, these threads multiply by the hundreds of thousands. What began as an open, competitive plain transforms into an impenetrable, bureaucratic thicket. This is the structural reality of the regulatory ratchet: a socioeconomic mechanism designed to spin effortlessly in the direction of added restriction, while locking tightly against any structural attempt to move backward. It acts as an economic tax on time, capital, and imagination, slowly draining a civilization of its capacity for radical innovation.

The fundamental mistake of modern economic reformers, classical liberals, and market-oriented politicians has been the flawed belief that this historical ratchet can be unwound using the same methodology by which it was constructed—one click, one rule, one compromise at a time. It cannot. Incremental deregulation is an illusion. Its marginal benefits are routinely swallowed by the structural noise of the broader business cycle, leaving its political champions exposed and its bureaucratic opponents vindicated. If the regulatory ratchet is an existential threat to long-term civilizational dynamism, the cure is not a administrative scalpel, but a policy of deregulatory shock and awe: the simultaneous, systemic dismantling of vast architectures of the administrative state in a single, concentrated moment. Only a massive, undeniable expansion can shatter the structural inertia of the status quo and reclaim the compounding growth that humanity has traded away for the illusion of managed safety.

II. Shifting Baselines and the Regulatory Ratchet

The Cure for the Regulatory Ratchet is Deregulatory Shock and Awe - An essay by ChatGPT (2024)

This article was written by ChatGPT in July of 2024. Tomorrow, we'll see what Gemini did with the identical prompt in June, 2026

Introduction

In the complex web of modern economies, regulations are often seen as a necessary means to ensure safety, fairness, and stability. However, over time, these regulations accumulate gradually—often as responses to crises or shifting political pressures. Their impacts, individually, may be small or seemingly benign, but the cumulative burden becomes significant. Like layers of paint applied over years, regulations pile up until the original surface is barely recognizable.

This phenomenon is what we refer to as the regulatory ratchet. Once a regulation is introduced, it is rarely removed, and the slow but steady buildup goes largely unnoticed by the public, economists, and policymakers. As a result, societies accept ever-increasing levels of regulation as the "new normal," forgetting what an unencumbered economy looks like.

Deregulating slowly or one regulation at a time is not a viable solution. The impact of piecemeal deregulation will be too gradual to be felt. Instead, I argue for a bold and comprehensive approach: deregulatory shock and awe. By repealing large swaths of regulation at once, we can unlock dramatic economic improvements that are immediately observable, much like the fishery scientists who, upon realizing their error, had to drastically rethink their approach to environmental management.

The Regulatory Ratchet – A Slow and Steady Accumulation

Definition of the Regulatory Ratchet

Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 25, 2020

Better information doesn't always lead to better decisions; A new robot passed its first trial at taking blood samples from human patients; Archaeologists discovered a sophisticated Soviet Spy radio when digging for a Roman villa; University of North Carolina survey finds surprisingly broad support for free speech, but also disparities between political conservatives and liberals; and a Steem essay reporting on the Sunday Night Soft Fork

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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for January 10, 2020

A TED talk describing Estonia's digital government; NASA planet-hunting space telescope finds potentially habitable world; How to find your own tiny meteorite; Nobel winning economist, Paul Krugman, reveals the reach of Internet scams; and a Steem tutorial to create a javascript calculator

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