Those of a certain ripe old age might recall a comic strip called “There Oughta Be a Law.” It ran for many years in all the newspapers, a once-popular form of mass communication which those of a certain ripe old age might also recall, and each installment featured an earnestly stylized illustration of a reader’s complaint about some minor annoyance or another which the reader deemed worthy of government-imposed punishment. The title became a popular catchphrase that outlasted the comic strip by many years, reflecting a widespread belief that a sufficient amount of law-making would be able to rid the world of all unpleasantness.
The strip’s disgruntled readers, and anyone else who has ever griped that “there oughta be a law,” will be happy to know that the United States of America will soon arrive at a point when there will at last be a law for every little thing. That’s the conclusion we’re reached, at any rate, upon reading that over the past three months the federal government has been generating new regulations at a brisk pace of 68 per day. According to the fine folks at the CNSnews.com, the past 90 days have brought new rules regarding everything from volatile organic compound emissions from architectural coatings to “enforcement criteria for canned ackee, frozen ackee, and other ackee products that contain hypoglycin A.”
Liberals who would scoff at the report because the web site’s “C” stands for conservative should note that they provide a handy link to the federal government’s own regulations.gov web site, which provides the same information with obvious pride in their industrious attempts to set everything right. There’s a listing there of the number of new regulations that have been added over different amounts of time, and although there’s a link to President Obama’s executive order for a thorough review of existing regulations there’s no tally of the regulations that have been done away with.
This proliferation of regulation will likely increase at a quickening rate for at least the next four years. The Obamacare bill and the Dodd-Frank financial reform law both weighed in with around 2,000 pages of new regulations, but those who perused those acts — nobody actually read them, of course — noticed that most of those pages were devoted to creating new agencies empowered to write even more regulations. The Obamacare bill created 159 of them, and Dodd-Frank established agencies ranging from a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to a Financial Stability Oversight Council to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. Each of these new agencies will soon be generating hundreds and hundreds of new regulations, and because every regulation usually creates some problem that necessitates scores of new regulations the creation of new rules will increase exponentially until every possible outcome in life has been regulated. If perfect bliss does not result, the public will conclude that there simply haven’t been enough rules passed and that still more are required.
Any conservatives inclined to worry about the effect of so many rules on the ordinary American’s liberty should take some consolation in the notion that the law of averages dictates that least some of these thousands of regulations make some sense. For all we know the federal government has spared us some ackee-related calamity, and for that we should be grateful. All this regulating should have a salutary effect on the paper industry, too, and once we’ve reached that nearby point when every citizen of the republic is required to engage the services of a compliance officer or two just to avoid running afoul of the regulators we will at last achieve full employment.
In the unlikely event that the growing army of wizards in Washington, D.C., overlook some small annoyance that continues to afflict you, be assured that they’re eager to hear about. The regulations.gov web site invites all suggestions about new rules, just as the authors of the “There Oughta Be a Law” comic strip did, but in their case they can actually make it a law. We have lots of ideas, ranging from those droopy trousers that the young folks favor to brain-dead behavior of fast food servers, but we’re only going to recommend a regulation that there be a lot fewer rules.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 