The new politics of regulation

In the 1920s the role of the federal government in the United States could be neatly and briefly identified as the functions highlighted in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: national defense, public works, public education, and the administration of justice. But with the Great Depression of the 1930s, government assumed new roles, expressed in the “alphabet agencies” and their related programs and regulatory activities, many of which are still with us in high degree. Further enlargement of government's role came in the post‐World War II '40s and '50s, which ushered in the Keynesian high employment policies that reached full blossom in the turbulent '60s. So far in the '70s federal regulatory activity has increased markedly, with over 20 new agencies created.