The Regulatory Hammer

Hard on the heels of the bizarre call for science and regulation to, at last, join forces and produce "freedom," comes today's front page piece in the Sunday Minneapolis Star Tribune Opinion section, headlined as "String of crises has one solution:  More regulation."

I suppose were are just seeing the fulfillment of the old cliche:  if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  Every failure, perceived or otherwise, in the private sector gives voice to those who clamor for more regulation.  More curiously, every failure of government also ends in a call for more regulation.

As is de rigueur amongst the political class, Mike Meyers begins his piece with the ritual denunciation of Republicans, conservatives, and Christians.  I think we've reached the point where we can dispense with this boilerplate, substituting with a set of initials, like LOL, IMO or OMG.  RDORCC would do the trick, I think, and save precious column inches for the argument proper.

Or perhaps I'm missing something deeper here.  Maybe in my nearly half-century of attempted communications, I've missed an obvious, and highly effective rhetorical technique:  insult your readers for paragraphs on end and they will be more receptive to changing their minds and adopting your position.  Remind me to try this sometime.

After his RDORCC, Mr. Meyers next recites the litany of "right-wing" failures:  Wall Street (big Obama donors), the Housing Crisis (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), the BP oil spill (big Obama donors) and so forth.

But we already know what the result would be if Mr. Meyers and Shawn Otto got their wish for an all-powerful, well-funded and empowered regulators:  California.  In the Golden State, the public is protected from free coffee and donuts while ice cream requires a two-year waiting period.

Unfortunately, resources are not limitless, regulators cannot be omni-present.  So vigilance against hardware store giveaways and vintage soda fountains has meant that large swaths of California have returned to a feral state, as Victor Davis Hanson has documented in his native Central Valley.  Dr. Hanson observes,

"It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate.  Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant."

Before someone issues the next mindless call for "more regulation," can we have a rethink of the existing regulatory state?  A good start would be this essay by Philip K. Howard in the Wall Street Journal on "results-based" regulation.