Government supremacists routinely argue for more government to ‘help the poor.’ Yet government regulations invariably harm the poor and cement the positions of the rich. Since the beginning of 21st century, the U.S. government has become increasingly “progressive”: with more regulations, higher tax rates, and a greater tax burden on ‘the rich.’ Yet “acccording to …
Category: the myth of “deregulation”
Mar 19
No one even knows how many federal agencies there are
Columnist Paul Driessen discusses a recent report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “Ten Thousand Commandments.” The report details the bone-crushing costs of federal regulations. Regulations keep business from starting. Regulations keep poor people from launching successful careers. Regulations make America poorer. See here. No one even knows how many Executive Branch agencies there are – …
Mar 17
Little Rock, Arkansas has only one taxi business because of overregulation
Governments everywhere have overregulated transportation and travel. In typical regulatory schemes, a good-ol-boy taxi service lobbies for laws that prevent competitors from starting up and competing with them. The laws are generally passed with assurances that the laws are needed to “protect the public” from dangerous, unsafe, diseased cabbies, etc. Of course, the laws create …
Feb 08
Two Lost Decades for the banking industry
Almost all business regulation harms the poor and small businesses and helps the biggest industry leaders. And in the big picture, even the good ol’ boys are harmed. Look at the above graph (courtesy of CNBC, see here). It shows that the overall value of the banking industry is about the same as it was …
Feb 08
The 37-page Glass-Steagall Act was replaced with a thousand pages of banking laws. This is “deregulation” in the world of Bernie Sanders.
“Deregulation” is one of the great phantoms of our time. Pro-government pundits and presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders repeatedly claim that private-sector influence in political elections has produced “deregulation” in American industries. Yet regulation is easy to measure. One can count pages, paragraphs, sections, enforcement budgets or actions, etc. There has been no deregulation anywhere, …
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