Thread by @lindsey_brink

A few thoughts in response to @oren_cass's provocative, but not trolling, tweet thread asking about daylight between our policy vision and the Obama administration's -- 1/n

https://twitter.com/oren_cass/status/1075042328472100864

First point --it's a vision paper, not a piece of specific policy advocacy, so it's pitched at a relative high level of abstraction -- the effect of which is to mask differences on policy specifics. 2/n

So I can picture some people on the center-left wholeheartedly endorsing the general approach to policymaking we lay out while disagreeing with Niskanen's particular policy positions on this or that. 3/n

Second, the policy vision we set forth is explicitly a hybrid that pulls elements from both the left and right -- which is another reason you might expect more centrist-minded elements of the Obama administration to find lots in our paper to agree with. 4/n

All that said, though, the paper repeatedly distinguishes our approach from Obama-style progressivism. Perhaps those distinctions will be clearer to @oren_cass when he has a chance to give the paper a closer read, but let me highlight a few. 5/n

1. We are much more focused on economic growth, and on entrepreneurial creative destruction as the primary engine of long-term growth, than our progressive friends are -- and, indeed, than @oren_cass is. 6/n

Reviving flagging long-term growth (av. U.S. growth rate in 21st century only half the av. rate throughout the 20th) and undertaking bold structural reforms to unlock that growth are at the center of our policy priorities and received little attention during the Obama years. 7/n

2. Much greater skepticism about technocratic regulation -- dense, highly complex, with a lot of flexibility for regulators to fine-tune this way or that depending on circumstances. 8/n

We think the technocratic style of reg is highly vulnerable to insider capture as well as to unforeseen consequences due to interaction with other elements of the regulatory thicket. We prefer a few big, dumb, rule-like interventions over countless little nudges. 9/n

3. Putting 1 and 2 together, we believe economic freedom needs to be protected from regulatory encroachments through some judicial protections of economic freedom -- not an idea one associates with progressives. 10/n

Here the idea isn't to draw bright lines about what can and can't be regulated (the libertarian approach) but to impose pro-public-interest conditions on how regulation is done. See the section on "Egaliatarian Lochnerism" in my book with Steve Teles "The Captured Economy." 11/n

That's enough for a tweet thread, but look forward to new position papers from @NiskanenCenter that add more specifics to the big picture sketched in "The Center Can Hold." We will continue to confound ideologues on both sides and offer reforms with real cross-party appeal. END