Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Era of Regulation Never Ended

For reasons I don’t entirely understand the impression that the present regrettable economic circumstances have been caused by a hands-off, laissez-faire approach to regulation seems to be widely held. This is curious since, as Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason.com, puts it in today’s Wall Street Journal, we have not been living in an age of regulatory roll-back. On the contrary, there has been a marvellous, winning combination of more and useless regulation.

If spending under Mr. Bush was a disaster, regulation was even worse. The number of pages in the Federal Registry is a rough proxy for the swollen expanse of the regulatory state. In 2001, some 64,438 pages of regulations were added to it. In 2007, more than 78,000 new pages were added. Worse still, argues the Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, Mr. Bush is the unparalleled master of “economically significant regulations” that cost the economy more than $100 million a year. Since 2001, he jacked that number by more than 70%. Since June 2008 alone, he introduced more than 100 economically significant regulations.

Whatever else you may say about Mr Bush it is hard to make the case that he was in any way, shape, form or instinct a friend of smaller-government. Quite the contrary in fact.  (The same might be said, of course, of Gordon Brown.) Nonetheless, Bush’s incompetence has empowered Barack Obama to intervene in the economy (and doubtless elsewhere too) to an extent that would have seemed all but inconceivable in the pre-Bush era. That’s another thing the new President should thank his predecessor for.

 

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