Theft at the Public Till
Good: Building codes that mean your house and home won’t crumble as an apartment building in Thailand recently did. Bad: A sea of regulations that differ in every state, preventing builders from competing nationally or offering economies of scale on building components. A general danger of many regulations is that they sound like they are trying to safeguard the consumer, but they are actually designed to prevent any competition with the bureaucrat’s brother-in-law. Good: Some safeguards against smuggling. Bad: Paperwork as an end in itself, as it was under communism. Such persnickety over-inspection is not only a morally taxing invasion of privacy, and a tremendous waste of time, but it inhibits the flow of production and trade. Because of the new European Community free trade laws, an inspection post on the Spanish border closed. Truck drivers used to wait three days at that post to clear customs. Spain employed ten people there to do no more than collect reams of forms they filed and forgot, meanwhile keeping real wealth out of the country, and raising the prices of those goods allowed in. Good: Loose oversight by an agency committed to helping provide safe, high-quality service for American consumers, like the Civil Aviation Commission after deregulation. Bad: Federal regulatory agencies commit- ted to micro-managing prices and processes instead of encouraging honest competition, like the Civil Aviation Commission before deregulation. The history of price- and service- setting regulation shows they hurt consumers and protect big, lazy businesses which have to do nothing except follow arcane but exact government regulations, no matter how stupid they might be. Consumers lose, un- less the mere sight of business in chains is worth the higher prices they pay and worse service they receive. Good: Enforcement of fair competition in the awarding of government contracts. Bad: Allowing so many appeals for contracts awarded that, for example, choosing a new computer system for the air traffic controllers has dragged on for five years beyond the first award. Good: Environmental laws that discourage the burning of fossil fu- els that release carbon dioxide, when responsible scientists show that “the
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