BEING CHOKED BY REGULATIONS

2 PARAGRAPHS 4 LIBERTY: 485

The first paragraph of the article entitled “Rationales for New Regulation” in the Summer 2024 edition of Regulation: The CATO Review of Business and Government, reads as follows:

“By any measure, US federal regulation is big business. Year after year, hundreds of thousands of employees at 70-plus regulatory agencies churn out thousands of new rules. Since 1970, the number of restrictions in the Code of Federal Regulation (CFR) has increased, on average, 3.2 percent per year. Touching all aspects of American life, the CFR surpassed one million restrictions in 2016 and shows no signs of stopping.”

Does this concern you? Fortunately, this year in its Loper decision the United States Supreme Court struck down its own 1984 Chevron decision which had given large amounts of discretion to regulatory agencies to determine the amount of rule-making power they had been assigned by Congress. So bureaucratic power has been severely reduced.

But we are still being choked by these regulations. For example, a few years ago California’s Coastal Commission decided that Sea World in San Diego was engaging is cruelty to animals in its Orca shows, so it ordered that the shows be canceled. You can reasonably agree with that conclusion or not, but how does the Coastal Commission have the authority to shut the shows down? These bureaucrats were never elected to the Legislature! The Coastal Commission was created to preserve the California coast line, but not to control the types of shows that are held on the coast. In fact, it would not be that strong a leap for the Coastal Commission to decide that movies shown on the coast were harmful to children. As further illustrations of the absurd, the CATO article went on to point out that Customs and Border Protection had issued a rule to restrict imports of certain archeological material, and the Coast Guard had restricted boating on a small section of the Ohio River on August 28, 2022 to allow swimmers to participate in the Great Ohio River Swim in Cincinnati. (Cincinnati is pretty far from the coast . . .) So thank you to the Supreme Court, but fundamentally it is up to us as voters to be aware of and control these bureaucratic excesses.

Question for the week: Do you know how the San Diego Freeway in Southern California received its numerical designation? When it was under construction people kept asking the question “About how many hours will it take to get there on this road?” And the answer was “Eh, four o’ five,” and it stuck . . .