January 27, 2006

Former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, generally considered the architect of the Clinton economic expansion, in Tuesday's W$J:

Finally, regulation should provide constraints where markets fail to reflect externalities, but those constraints must be based on risk/reward calculations. Thus, effective environmental protection should be recognized as a long-term economic imperative as well as a value in itself, but restraint should be proportionate to the benefits, however difficult measuring those benefits often is. Similarly, further tort reform could strike a better balance between providing the ability to obtain redress and generating costs that impede competitiveness. More generally, our objective should not be to eliminate all risks, but rather to reduce risk to optimal risk/reward levels.