We Are Victims of Too Much Regulations
By: Hon. William L. Witham, Jr., Advisory Board Member, A Better Delaware
Most people do not realize that federal and state regulation is exploding at a record pace. Over the last decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation during each session of Congress. That amounts to about 2 to 3 million words of new federal law each year. That is not all, even the bills have grown in size with the average page count of around 2 pages in the 1950s to 18 today. Same is true for Delaware. When one considers the amount of paper that go with these bills, we seemed to be killing entire forests.
Is this due to the fact that our society is more complicated than it was in years past? Less than a hundred years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018, the U.S. Code encompassed 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages without adding the huge expansion of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The CFR is a collection of rules and regulations for the federal government. Each federal agency writes rules on implementing or interpretating laws. Delaware does the same for bills passed by our legislature.
Obviously, we need laws and regulations to maintain public order and safety. Yet we as a free people lose a little bit more of our freedom when government passes laws and regulations supposably to improve our lives. For example, have you noticed that there is now limitation on what kind of car we must buy, what kind of appliance and heating system we have to buy for our homes? There are limits on how our meat and vegetables must be labeled, the type of bags we must use. The list goes on with every product we buy or make. Some products we can no longer buy made in the United States, such as incandescent light bulbs. I am sure you have noticed that some of the household items we buy do not last or work as well as the “old” ones. Showerheads are federally regulated to restrict flow, as are the toilets and garbage disposal units. Have you ever used the new gas cans? They are awful – the pre-regulated ones are in big demand. It is hard to think of any product that is not regulated, presumably for safety, that is not trapped in some kind of forced design emanating from a federal or state agency. Even, the municipality gets into the act. As residents of Dover, we must use certain garbage cans for trash and recyclables. Have you noticed that Dover is now billing its residents on a quarterly basis for stormwater management, supposably required by the federal government? The city apparently did this without notice or explanation and just sent bills out. Of course, the state now requires Delawareans to buy electric cars by a projected and improbable date. Most citizens of Delaware are aware of the controversy over the impact of windfarms coming to Delaware and Maryland off our coast and worry about the cost and impact. It makes us envious of states that have the remedy of referendums.
Government regulates all aspects of our economy and to a large extent our life. Take meat for example. It is not possible to raise cattle and sell the meat without jumping through many hoops and using independent processors. This benefits agri-business, but not small farmers. If you want to start a new business, the number of roadblocks you have to jump over is staggering. Try hiring one employee, for example. The bureaucratic requirements can be daunting – permits, licensing and IRS requirements multiply the cost of doing business. It seems the bureaucracies simply cannot sit still. They make new rules and regulations on a daily basis. There is no consideration of the economic cost and impact on growth and job creation. The United States has created whole industries entirely devoted to achieving compliance.
In the late 1970s, there was a bipartisan consensus to deregulate three industries: trucking, energy, and telecommunications. All three initiatives were a huge success and the prosperity of the 1980s is owed to these emancipations.
But this success was short-lived, in part, due to the financial deregulation of 1983, which freed up the banking sector that was then blamed for every crisis that followed, from the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s to the 2008 financial crisis. It is a given that some regulation is justified, but the government tends to always go overboard.
We can and have faith in the private sector. No business wants its product or service to be a failure or attacked by the public. The business wants to be successful. Every professional field has an oversight organization that certifies and provides credentialing apart from government mandates. For example, lawyers have the bar exam that regulates the admission of attorneys. The Underwriters Laboratories (UL) founded in 1894 independently certifies industries and has great credibility. Much of our bureaucratic regulation is too expensive, too arduous, and too limiting for our free enterprises to thrive. In an ideal world, the government would only do what is mentioned in the Constitution and nothing more. That may not be possible, but we need to substantially push back from too much regulation and let our free society survive and thrive.
William L. Witham Jr. is a retired Kent County Resident Judge who has served over 40 years in Delaware’s justice system. He is also a former leader in the US Army Reserve and National Guard with 34 years of service.