2012-11-06

Cato: Unregulated Is Not Unconstrained


The forces that constrain behavior are manifold—moral, physical, financial, reputational, and so on. Formally, the word “regulate,” with its roots in the Latin regulare (“to control by rule, direct”), refers to only one kind of constraint: the governmental kind (or at least some kind of authority). Yet when one calls something “unregulated,” that often seems to imply that it can act on whim, launching itself in any direction it likes. Not so.
Foreign Affairs has a capsule review of a book on non-governmental organizations that relies on the distinction between other constraints and government regulation. The review describes the factors that arguably cause international NGOs to behave well, even though they are “not regulated.”

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