Triumph of the Small-Minded Bureaucrats
Recently I met a man bound at the wrists and ankles with red tape.
He is a doctor with a successful practice who likes wine—enough that he decided a few years ago to turn his hobby into a side business and open Oklahoma City’s one and only commercial vineyard.
By doing so, he walked straight into a blizzard: a disorienting, frustrating maelstrom of city, county and state bureaucracy. But it wasn’t random like weather. It was calculated—and it seemed directly aimed at shutting him down.
As this man hosted a tasting of his various wines for my friends and me, he told his harrowing tale: his endless trips into the city to pacify officials; their continual demands that he make pricey renovations to meet various codes; the volcano of paperwork he had to repeatedly fill out with expensive expert help.
As he spoke, recent stories came to mind of enterprising youths who, in time-honored American tradition, set up lemonade stands—only to be closed down and fined for lacking proper licenses and permits. This in the name of “protecting the safety of people,” who presumably don’t appreciate the risk of drinking a product concocted in the wilds of a domestic kitchen.
With America’s unemployment over 9 percent and the economy stagnant, one can’t help but wonder how much this kind of senseless hyper-regulation is to blame. How many budding businesses are being suffocated by bureaucratic micromanagement? How many jobs are failing to materialize because of regulatory overreach? How much are America’s once legendary productive energies being sucked dry over mere nonsense?
The Regulation Business Is Booming
The day a new businessman hires a single employee, he becomes subject to at least 10 federal regulations. That number swells as the business succeeds. To comply with such requirements, small businesses have to shell out $10,585 for every employee they hire, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Regulations cost each American firm an average of $161,000—and that doesn’t count the costs it passes down to consumers. American manufacturers are hit worst: They pay an average of $688,944 per firm. If the government is trying to stifle economic growth, this is a superb way.
Companies generally may be hurting because of it, but one business is clearly booming: the manufacture of still more regulations. In his 2011 report “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State,” Clyde Wayne Crews named 845 rules and regulations proposed just last year that are expected to affect small businesses. The year before had 758; the year before that, 753. Who can keep up? Someone opening a restaurant in New York City, for example, “may have to contend with as many as 11 city agencies, often with conflicting requirements; secure 30 permits, registrations, licenses and certificates; and pass 23 inspections,” the New York Times reveals.
While the rest of the economy is stuck or shrinking, government just grows and grows. As Mark Steyn brings out in his book After America, “In the ’50s, 1 in 20 members of the workforce needed government permission in order to do his job. Today, it’s one in three.” And it’s a self-feeding monster. Federal regulatory compliance cost an outrageous $1.13 trillion in 2005—nearly 10 percent of gdp. That doesn’t even count the cost of state and local red tape. Surely this money could be put to better use than rescuing unsuspecting consumers from unlicensed lemonade.
Supposedly all this fussy superintendence is aimed at keeping us safe. It is the ultramagnified version of the mommy who keeps her soft son “safe” at a video game console rather than risk letting him explore the dangerous woods. And the effect is the same. At one time the nation built great railroads and dams, won world wars, and sent men to the moon. But, as Prof. Bruce Charlton of the University of Buckingham in England wrote, around the 1970s “the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by bureaucracy.” “Now we have dull and docile committee members,” he wrote, “whose major priority is not to do the job but to avoid personal responsibility and prevent side-effects … all of whom are hemmed-about by regulations such that—whatever they do do, or do not do—they will be in breach of some rule or another.”
What have we done to ourselves? Where’s the common sense?
Keeping Everyone Safe?
The shift of influence from visionary, ambitious leaders to today’s myopic kid-busting administrators parallels America’s loss of national power. While America busies itself with keeping everyone safe, the rest of the world screams past.
The world’s most ambitious construction is taking place on foreign shores: the world’s largest power station, the Three Gorges Dam, in China; the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, in the United Arab Emirates. Such projects would never pass environmental impact requirements in America. America’s infrastructure is ranked well behind that of every other major advanced economy at number 23 in the world. In 2009, Japan overtook the U.S. as the world’s largest auto manufacturer.
In 2010, Europe’s Airbus eclipsed America’s Boeing to become the world’s largest commercial aircraft producer. America has fallen behind China as the world’s lead high-technology exporter. In July, China sent its most advanced deep-sea submersible to over 5,000 meters, deeper than the U.S. can go; America had already fallen behind Japan and Russia in this commercially, scientifically and militarily important technology. China, after having virtually no live surveillance capability a decade ago, has since caught up with America. It has already put men in space, and India is shooting to do so in 2016. Meanwhile, this summer marked the end of America’s space shuttle program.
Last year, America fell behind Brazil, China and India as the preferred place to invest, according to a Bloomberg survey. Until 2008, the U.S. was the world’s most competitive economy, according to the World Economic Forum. In September it was announced America has slipped to fifth place behind Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden and Finland.
Such headlines have become routine. They are unmistakable marks of a collapsing empire. Believe it or not, this shrinkage in superpower was prophesied to occur just before the end of this age. God warned of a time when sound judgment would be far from us, when we would grope and stumble in broad daylight like blind men (Isaiah 59:9-10). He told America—the descendants of ancient Israel—that because of our sins, He would remove the nation’s mighty, honorable, capable, wise, eloquent and grand-thinking leaders and allow selfish, small-minded children to take their places (Isaiah 3:1-4). This prophecy stands fulfilled.
We’ll soon see how “safe” we are in the long run.