Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
I’ve long said that the government cannot be a meaningful part of the solution to America’s problems and economy because it is too busy being the biggest part of the problem. Yesterday, Matthew Andrew and James L. Gattuso published a piece on Fee-dot-org that did a nice job of proving my point. The headline says it all: “The Regulatory Industry is Growing Faster than the Real Economy.”
The men waste little time in explaining the depth of the problem, mentioning in the first paragraph that the regulatory industry has quadrupled in size since 1960, while the second ‘graph points out that the Federal government employs more regulators than General Motors has employees globally.
The article, which I won’t try to elaborate on in great depth here, partly due to time constraints and partly due to the fact it doesn’t need any help from me telling its story, is full of eye-catching numbers and stats. Among those is the fact that while the U.S. Economy grew at an anemic 2.6 percent between 2014 and 2015, the regulatory business grew by 4.3 percent. The forces working to strangle the economy to death are vastly outpacing the economy itself under president Obama. While the president can do very little to actually control the former, they can do a lot to control the latter. And so, Obama has; he’s added heaps of regulations upon an already over-burdened market and the jobless “recovery” he’s presided over for seven years has been made worse due to it – not that he or any statist would ever make that connection.
The neat thing about the article is that it paints an honest, if incomplete picture. The authors of the studies the writers refer to in the article only included regulations that hamper private sector transactions. So, among those 277,000 useless federal regulators cited, those don’t even include regulators with the Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration, Defense Department, or the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to the article. Add those 277,000 useless federal employees to the many thousands of other non-regulatory useless government employees – agents of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Transportation Safety Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, etc. – and the net drain on the economy by needless, pointless and useless government activity is staggering. This staggering effect would explain why the economy has become effectively staggered. The barriers between would-be entrepreneurs and starting a business now are so great as to be almost insurmountable by all but the well-to-do. Proof that regulation Democrats love so much only hurts the same people they claim to love so much abounds, and is ignored. And don’t even think of going rogue and starting a business without all the “necessary” licenses and fees and regulations and inspections.
Where did all these unnecessary federal employees come from? Even during the immediate aftermath of the crash of 2008, the government was hiring people to put the businesses that remained out of business. And that is not hyperbole, but the actual net-effect of this insane regulatory climate we are in. Remember, the FDA decided to “regulate” e-cigarettes, and by this time next year, your vaping choices will be down to those products offered by RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris while all those vape shops occupying long-vacant strip mall units will be gone.
The case against government in general, and the one we have in particular is so completely and blatantly obvious that I still cannot figure out why we all still insist on participating in it.
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