Regulation: The Weed Of Our Garden

Regulation slows economic growth? Well, I never! J'amais! Unpossible!

You may as well just fingerbang me.

Hang on.

Just going outside for a second...just as I suspected. The sky. It's blue.

From QL:

To get a sense of how much regulation has increased, they looked at the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). They found that the CFR page count had increased from 19,335 pages in 1949 to 134,261 in 2005, a more than six-fold increase.

Well, dontchayaknow society is much more complex now? The amount of people not paying their "fair share" has increased 64, no, 65 times! So it's not catching up to the greed!

We need more taxes. More. Taxes. Argh!

That reduction in the growth rate has led to an accumulated reduction in GDP of about $38.8 trillion as of the end of 2011. That is, GDP at the end of 2011 would have been $53.9 trillion instead of $15.1 trillion if regulation had remained at its 1949 level.” The American economy is just 28 percent as large as it would have been if it could have gotten by on a mere 20,000 pages of federal regulations. As the world's other industrialized countries have followed similar paths over the last six decades, heaping regulations upon regulations, it is not unrealistic to assume that most of the wealthy nations of the world could be four times wealthier.

Can it be...no, it can't.

But can it?

Can it be it's a struggle to make ends meet or that wages are stagnant because regulation acts like weed strangling flowers looking to blossom?

No. I must go!

There is a different kind of objection to the argument that we would all be a lot richer if there were fewer regulations. It takes the form of such questions as: What's so great about economic growth? Aren't we rich enough already? How much money do we really need, anyway?

Fair esoteric questions that have no place in policy. After all, it's none of your god damn business what people determine is "enough."

People who ask these questions completely ignore the fact that not everyone has the same tastes, needs, wants, ambitions etc. Some people are driven so much that they may never be satisfied but is it really our place to judge it or "curb it" through bad policy?

Of course not. And if you think that way...congrats. You're a tyrannical despot who thinks they know what's best for others. Or as my liberal friend says when you push him into the corner, "yeah well, people can't be trusted to make the right decisions so politicians have to."

Scary, huh to believe in government to that point?

Here's your aluminum Busy Body Bloomberg award and go thank the children you pretend to be helping.

Now that all being said, there's no question some regulation is needed. Rules of engagement if you prefer. Where private enterprise choose not to or fails to serve consumers, the state can and in some case must step in for the public good.

It gets messy when bureaucrats and lobbyists sleep with one another to conspire against that aim.

We believe in separation between church and state, then why shouldn't our secularism extend to separating politicians from corporations?