By Newspot Nigeria
Bob Livingston’s recent piece offers a fiery critique of big government, licensing regimes, and regulatory overreach — arguing that bureaucratic controls are choking liberty and enabling elite dominance. He paints President Donald Trump as a corrective force, a populist figure fighting back against a system designed by and for entrenched power.
Livingston’s frustration resonates in many corners of the world, including Nigeria, where excessive regulation has long been a barrier to innovation and prosperity. Yet, as persuasive as his arguments may seem, they invite a deeper question: Is all regulation inherently bad, or is the real problem how it is applied?
What Livingston Gets Right
Livingston correctly highlights how licensing can become a tool of exclusion. In fields like hair braiding, event photography, or artisan crafts — areas driven largely by consumer choice — regulatory red tape often hurts small-scale entrepreneurs more than it protects the public. In both the U.S. and Nigeria, licensing has too often been captured by elite associations eager to create monopolies in the name of “standards.”
His warning about excessive federal mandates is also timely. Whether it’s rising car prices due to emission rules or food costs driven by overregulation, the burden often falls on everyday people — not on the politicians or corporate elites crafting those policies.
Where the Argument Breaks Down
But the problem isn’t regulation itself — it’s bad regulation. While Livingston advocates for a free-for-all market with minimal oversight, history and daily life show that such a system is ripe for abuse.
Take Nigeria’s Suya market, for example.
Who regulates the Suya you eat?
Multiple investigations have exposed how some Suya vendors in Nigeria source meat from dead, diseased animals simply because it’s cheaper. This “toxic Suya” is often sold without scrutiny, exposing consumers to long-term health risks like bacterial infections, cancer, and liver complications. Victims rarely realize what caused the damage — and by the time symptoms manifest, it’s too late to trace it back to that N200 snack.
This is exactly what happens when there’s no regulation at all. Without meat inspectors, food safety laws, or enforcement of Nigeria’s Meat Hygiene Act, the public is left vulnerable.
So yes, regulation can be abused. But deregulation can kill.
What Nigeria (and America) Actually Need
Neither overregulation nor anarchy will solve our problems. What both nations need is smart, transparent, and targeted regulation:
- Cut red tape where it chokes small businesses.
- Keep safety oversight where people’s lives are on the line.
- Hold elites and agencies accountable, not just the small players.
President Trump, now back in power, may talk tough on bureaucracy — but whether his actions align with liberty for the masses or privileges for the powerful remains to be seen. Liberty shouldn’t just be about fewer rules — it should be about better rules, for all.
Conclusion
Livingston’s call to reclaim liberty is compelling — but liberty without guardrails is fragility disguised as freedom. Nigeria’s Suya dilemma shows what happens when oversight disappears and public health becomes an afterthought.
At Newspot Nigeria, we believe the path forward is not deregulation or state control — but citizen-centered reform. One that values freedom and fairness. Innovation and safety. Business growth and public good.
Because in the end, liberty should never come at the cost of your life.
Bob Livingston on big government, licensing regimes, and regulatory overreach
Politicians and voters both embrace socialism, with many of them doing so thinking they’re embracing the liberty of our Founders. But there is nothing conservative about the welfare state, forever wars, the police state or the regulatory regime we live under. All are signs and symptoms of big government and are used to steal our liberties, particularly the liberties of free association, free assembly, free speech, free markets, personal liberty and control over one’s own wealth and spending.
Licensing
In every imaginable sort of hobby or leisure pursuit, there are always a number of people so devoted to their pastime that they inevitably end up becoming experts at it. Many eventually realize that other enthusiasts will pay them for the benefit of their experience and expertise, thereby allowing the most dedicated to actually make a living doing the thing they love the most.
Then things start to bureaucratize. Loose enthusiast affiliations become chartered professional organizations, most requiring membership fees and establishing exclusionary criteria. If these groups get big enough to have money, they begin to pressure the government for legislative favor.
For fields in which interests conflict, or in which one party’s health or prosperity is vulnerable, such regulatory apparatuses may make sense (think medicine or large-scale manufacturing) to some. But in small-scale occupations fueled largely by discretionary consumer demand, they make no sense at all.
Not everyone is categorically opposed to governmental regulation. The problem is that state-required licensing is unnecessary and causes legal pandemonium, both for the industry and for the consuming public. Most licensing provides little or no benefit to the consuming public; is unworkable; and would require a hand-picked cabal to arbitrarily decide standards of care and requirements of practice, backed up by the threat of criminal liability commensurate with serious offenses like drunk driving and assault.
The modern push for regulation of everything is not a consumer grassroots movement or a local response to a perceived local problem, but rather a concerted effort from a handful of certification organizations requesting that they have input in deciding who may practice their trade and who may not.
It is classic cronyism. Perfectly stable occupational pursuits are steamrolled by a small group of its richest oligarchs, eager to grease the wheels of a pliable political class.
Mandates
This dovetails with the mandates and rules imposed on established businesses. The Biden-Harris administration put in nearly $1.78 trillion worth of rules and regulations on Americans and their businesses as of this past October since January 2021, with much of that being finalized in the year running up to Donald Trump being re-elected, according to the American Action Forum (AAF).
According to the AAF, the total number of finalized regulations put in place last year was 327. Everything from tailpipe emissions to electric vehicle mandates that raise the price of cars to Biden’s “price control” agenda — all under the guise of “taking on” big business and lowering prices actually drove up inflation, and the American consumer is left holding the bag as usual. President Biden signed the Democrats’ so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” into law, promising it would reduce inflation and make life more affordable for Americans… and inflation went up more than 15 percent.
Big Government
Big government is a masterpiece of corporate cynicism, propaganda perfection and people control. It was not created for the people, by the people, nor of the people. It was created, or at least evolved, for the power and benefit of the elite and their politicians and bureaucrats.
If you need any proof of this beyond what your eyes should see, how about the fact that four of the six richest counties in the United States are all suburbs of Washington, D.C.? Not to mention number 12 as well, all suburbs of the shining city on a hill that serves as the seat of the federal government.
We are living on the edge of either the abyss, facing a financial crisis that is not understood by the public, who is losing their life’s savings through a transfer of wealth to State actors, or a new day where Americans have decided enough is enough, and take back the country. Is Donald Trump a harbinger, with all of his executive orders and reforms? Will he root out hidden government growth as well as the obvious overspending?
Trump fits the mold of someone who could be trusted by those of us who consider ourselves conservative, Libertarian, and liberty-minded, even though Trump has not always been an enemy of the left. Yet he always talks as if he is beholden to no one, and angry voters sick and tired of politicians — many of whom are owners of small businesses, homemakers, blue collar workers, college students, retirees and veterans affected by hidden fees and mandates costing them trillions — and who oppose things like big government, increased taxes, regulations and loss of freedoms like being told they can’t have a flag on their front lawn love the way he talks.
I’m not one for flag worship, but I am more than sympathetic toward the “tea” in the defunct Tea Party’s adopted name, which is an acronym for “taxed enough already.” Few people ever realize that big government and big business work together to perpetually extract labor and wealth from the people. This is called fascism, and make no mistake that it is alive and well. Not in the White House in the way the Left claims, but hidden beneath the surface of our state-run economy.
This bureaucratic tyranny is as bad for the United States as it was for any so-called fascist or even communist country, and it is more sophisticated. Liberty flows from within you, dear reader. If you want to keep it, you must resist the forces trying to take it from you bit by bit.
Your for the truth,
Bob Livingston
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