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Paul Krugman gives a shout-out to Rick Perlstein in his latest column, and it’s well deserved. While accounts pile up of the failures of the American regulatory state in detecting harmful additives to our (and our pets’) food supply, Perlstein has been assiduously documenting the slow-motion disaster, putting the pieces together and showing how the breakdown of the American regulatory state isn’t some accidental byproduct of thirty years of conservative ascenion, but the natural result of conservatism’s ideological vision. It was an explicit goal of the movement to gut regulation. And this is what you get.