Freedom

Americans are less free than we once were.

According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute...

The tax code is now 72,536 pages long. And...

• Federal regulations cost $1.75 trillion per year in compliance costs (according to the Small Business Administration). That’s equivalent to about half of federal spending. Government’s cost is actually about 50 percent bigger than most people think.
• Agencies issued 3,752 final rules in 2010. At that pace, a new rule comes into effect every two hours or so.
• Another 4,225 rules are in the pipeline right now.
• The Federal Register hit an all-time high 81,405 pages in 2010.
• Economically significant regulations are way up. These are defined as rules that have over $100 million of economic impact. There were 224 in 2010. That’s a 22 percent increase over 2009′s 184.

Certainly, regulations in a country of 300+ million are necessary.  But I don't think you have to be skeptical of government efficiency (as I am) to believe that lots of regulations are unnecessary and would not pass any kind of cost-benefit analysis.

Last week, Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY) asked an EPA official for an example of a regulation being rejected because the costs outweighed the benefits. The official couldn't come up with an answer.

I seriously doubt whether the EPA pays any attention to the costs of the regulations it promulgates. I would argue that the regulatory agencies of the executive branch are less interested in promoting regulations that pass cost-benefit muster than they are about shaping society in accordance with their visions of how it ought to be.

It's worth noting that their is little, if any, Congressional oversight of these regulations--which is understandable, I suppose, given the sheer volume of them. The end result is that Americans are so heavily regulated that it requires think tanks to sort through the morass, because we certainly can't.

And, whether necessary or not, the more we are regulated, and the more those regulations cost, the less free we are. Because the relationship between government power and personal liberty is zero-sum. Always has been. Always will be.