Laissez faire aux États-Unis?

NBC show Saturday Night Live has quite a reputation for deservedly taking the Mickey out of Donald Trum, to which Mr Trup has often replied with furious tweets.

On 12 December 2016 the show lampooned some of Trump’s cabinet selections, especially that of including Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. (Pruitt has sued the EPA on climate change several times).

“Scott Pruitt is excited for the job and ready to protect us all from the environment,” Kellyanne Conway (Kate McKinnon) said in a comedy sketch.

“It’s almost like Mr. Trump appoints these people specifically to undermine the very agencies they head,” Jake Tapper (Beck Bennet) said. “Kellyanne, are these bad picks?”

“No Jake, they are not bad,” she answers. “They are alt-good.”

Unlike in earlier weeks, Trump didn’t tweet a reply.

“It’s almost like Mr. Trump appoints these people specifically to undermine the very agencies they head.” Indeed so. That’s precisely the point. Mr Trump, it would appear, along with many other Republicans and Americans generally, simply wants to remove government from people’s lives and every day affairs. That is, he wants to go back to the early C19th, where largely all government did was what we now call foreign affairs, defence, navigation, migration and trade … plus various laws that regulated personal and business relationships. NOT health care, welfare, social services, education, civil rights, economics, energy, infrastructure, housing, environment, manufacturing, technology, etc.

A novel experiment in Laissez-faire government? Interesting if it were not so potentially deadly.