2/17/2012

Regulation is out of control in the US

From The Economist magazine:

A Florida law requires vending-machine labels to urge the public to file a report if the label is not there. The Federal Railroad Administration insists that all trains must be painted with an “F” at the front, so you can tell which end is which. Bureaucratic busybodies in Bethesda, Maryland, have shut down children’s lemonade stands because the enterprising young moppets did not have trading licences. The list goes hilariously on. . . .

Consider the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. Its aim was noble: to prevent another financial crisis. Its strategy was sensible, too: improve transparency, stop banks from taking excessive risks, prevent abusive financial practices and end “too big to fail” by authorising regulators to seize any big, tottering financial firm and wind it down. This newspaper supported these goals at the time, and we still do. But Dodd-Frank is far too complex, and becoming more so. At 848 pages, it is 23 times longer than Glass-Steagall, the reform that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. Worse, every other page demands that regulators fill in further detail. Some of these clarifications are hundreds of pages long. Just one bit, the “Volcker rule”, which aims to curb risky proprietary trading by banks, includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions. . . . .

of the 400 rules it mandates, only 93 have been finalized. . . .

Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis. . . . .

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1 Comments:

Blogger Chas said...

Markie Marxist sez: "Regulation out of control in the US? We Marxists are fully in control of US regulation and we've only begun to micromanage the American people. I think we need to do more with colors. You know, like the exact shade of ice cream that people are allowed to buy and stuff like that. After all, regulating important things isn't much of a challenge - people expect that. It's forcing them to comply with tiny, insignificant government impositions (because there are severe penalties attached for noncompliance) that really makes us Marxists feel important. Beating the American people into submission with innumerable rules is just common communist sense. That's how we dominate people. Ha! Ha! All your regulation are belong to us! Ha! Ha!”

2/20/2012 8:04 AM  

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