I’m working on a paper about the regulatory reform movement of the 1970s. If you’ve read anything at all about regulation, even the newspaper, you’ve probably heard the term “command and control”.
“Command and control” is a common description for government regulation that prescribes what some actor should do. So, for example, the CAFE standards say that the cars produced by car manufacturers must, on average, have a certain level of fuel efficiency. Or the EPA’s air quality standards say that ozone levels cannot exceed a certain number of parts per billion. Or such regulations may simply forbid some things, like the use of asbestos in many types of products.
This is typically contrasted with incentive-based regulation, or market-based regulation, which doesn’t set an absolute standard but imposes a cost on an undesirable behavior, like carbon taxes, or provides some kind of reward for good (usually meaning efficient) performance, as…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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