The faceless bureaucrats in these positions have the ability to destroy livelihood, whole towns, and even industries with the stroke of a pen. And they suffer zero consequences as a result.
Safety regulations can wipe out businesses. Not having (or following!) regulations can wipe out lives on an enourmous scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
The point is not to say "regulation good" or "regulation bad", but that these decisions are important and should be taken seriously with submissions from those involved as well as experts. The process has to be sound, and we need to de-partisanise it where possible.
The point is that regulation is important. Whether you have good regulation, bad regulation or no regulation it has impact and the discussion is important.
The EPA was an obstacle for Marc Edwards during the DC water crisis, but then was one of his biggest advocates during Flint.[0]
Examples like this are common enough. So it surprises me that most ideological debates are about whether government is good or harmful. It's both. There are failure modes both with it and without.
Agencies are made up of people, who sometimes do great work and save lives, sometimes learn from past mistakes, and sometimes make new ones that are incredibly costly to society.
I guess "We should study the areas where unintended consequences are most likely to dominate and limit government overreach in those areas, but recognize we still have real problems to solve where it might be the best tool for the job, so avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater" doesn't make a great bumper sticker.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Edwards_(civil_engineerin...
A gross over simplification of the current party lines would look like this.
Libertarians argue that government is always the problem, and never the solution.
Conservatives argue that markets rarely fail, and the government is so terrible of a solution that most of the time the cure is worst than the disease. But is useful in some limited cases of market failure.
Liberals argue that markets fail pretty often and so we need government a little more often than what conservatives suggest.
Of course this ignores the building of the evangelical and populist branches of the Republican party which don't fall as neatly into the abstraction as the old guard business Republicans.
You can always add more nuance. Ehrenreich had a great piece 20 years ago, "Confessions of a Recovering Statist" with arguments from the left for skepticism of government power. Some people follow that mold and consider themselves liberal-tarians. Some on the right are more hawks, nationalists, or law and order types who prefer strong state institutions.
But speaking in broad swaths, the impression that I get is that most people have a pretty shallow understanding of political theory, and go with the simplest heuristic possible. No fault of their own, it doesn't interest them. They have lawns to mow and bills to pay.
Given that, a better simplification of the current party lines might not drill down into subfactions of parties, but to capture most people, you could get away with something like "I'm on team red" vs. "I'm on team blue."
Short of that, I'm not convinced pro-G / anti-G is that bad of a model for most people though.
It's a very common stereotype on the right, that members of left are interested in more government for the sake of government. And labeling a side pro-government perpetuates this misperception.
Let's talk about perceptions and misperceptions.
Most Americans have no idea who is in power, or how their government is structured:
http://www.businessinsider.com/poll-many-americans-dont-know...
Given that, I'll grant that it's probably a mistake to think that people's political ideologies have anything to do with a theory of government at all.
Most people's political ideologies are probably about as refined as a blue/red color preference.