See
The Tip of the Regulatory Iceberg by Veronique de Rugy of Reason.
"In 2014, the government issued 2,400 new regulations, including 27 major
rules that may cost $80 billion or more annually. They range from
forcing restaurants to list the number of calories in food—even though
past experiments have revealed that such measures fail to change
consumers' behavior—to reducing consumer choices and increasing energy
prices by imposing tighter energy efficiency mandates on the plugs that
we use to charge cellphones, laptops, and even electric toothbrushes.
These figures can be found in a new paper by Heritage Foundation
scholars Diane Katz and James L. Gattuso, in which they tally the number
and cost of government regulations over the past six years of President
Barack Obama's administration—and show that Washington's control over
the economy and Americans' lives is intensifying. According to their
count, during the first six years of the Obama administration, the
number of new major rules reached 184, but another 126 are in the
pipeline. That's more than twice the number imposed by President George
W. Bush, who wasn't shy about regulating the economy.
Katz and Gattuso explain, "The cost of just these 184 rules is
estimated by regulators to be nearly $80 billion annually." But this is
only the tip of the iceberg. Official regulatory costs are vastly
underestimated, among other things, because of the large number of rules
for which costs have not been fully quantified.
More importantly, it doesn't appropriately account for the
businesses, innovations, and economic growth that will never exist
because of the incessant accumulation of regulations. Take the
bureaucrats at the Federal Aviation Administration, who have effectively
banned the use of commercial unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly
referred to as drones. This and the myriad other questionable drone
regulations proposed by the FAA have been widely criticized as arbitrary
and nontransparent. Another example was the FAA's proposal to require
drone pilots to obtain the same license as old-school airplane pilots.
Thank goodness it appears that the FAA is walking away from this bad
idea. But the bottom line is that the FAA has demonstrated its penchant
for imposing destructive constraints on this new technology.
Meanwhile, a more hands-off approach to regulating drones in other
countries has led to new, exciting commercial uses for drones all over
the world. For instance, a startup called Matternet uses drones to
deliver critical supplies in places where roads can keep people isolated
for months at a time. The potential is huge, considering that over 1
billion people live in such places. Germany's DHL already uses drones to
deliver medicine to the small city of Juist on a small island in the
North Sea. And a few weeks ago, we saw how the charity GlobalMedic was
using drones to help aid relief operations in Nepal after the country
was ravaged by earthquakes.
Yet the FAA continues its destructive approach with new proposed
rules to further constrain drones that are less than 55 pounds. The
rules would, among other things, prohibit them from conducting
deliveries and prohibit operation outside the hours of official sunrise
and sunset.
In other words, forget about sending medication or food to people in
areas where ground travel is not possible, and forget about the
30-minute delivery service Amazon Prime Air—in the United States, that
is.
But that's a drop in the bucket compared with dozens of other costly
rules, including 13 regulations of the financial system that saw the
light of day in 2014. According to Katz and Gattuso, eight of those were
the product of Dodd-Frank, an act that was supposed to reduce the risk
of a major bank failure but is actually a regulatory burden that
cripples small banks while further protecting even larger institutions.
In other words, Katz and Gattuso conclude, the need for reform of the
regulatory system has never been greater."
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