Regulations

People dislike regulations, until someone seeks to place a manufactured home on their block. Trust me.

What’s troubling is how few people understand the regulatory process. It’s much easier to dislike something, or someone, if you don’t know anything about them. Let’s take a simple look at how regulations got started and how they work.

I suppose they got started when the cave dwellers decided that the toilet area and the living area should be separated. If you’d rather, Genesis sets forth the earliest written regulation in Judo/Christian literature in its second chapter: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’”

At any rate, the regulation of our lives, despite what libertarians think, goes way back in American history. It was James Madison, I think, who observed, “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

We might compare the regulatory process to the evolutionary process. Some of the first governmental regulations originated, believe it or not, at the request of the industry that was to be regulated. These granted certain privileges designed to increase profits or discourage competition.

Regulations then evolved to solve problems. A river catches fire. The air in large, automobile-infested cities becomes unbreathable. Skyscrapers block out sunlight from the streets below. Terrorists carry firearms on passenger planes for the purpose of hijacking them. Minorities aren’t allowed to vote and are lynched if they tried. Uh, … well let’s leave that one for now. We solved some problems, albeit with loss to our personal freedoms. We considered the loss worthwhile.

Then came the final stage in the evolution of regulations. Governments hired people to write them. Now some, not all, people who face the task of writing regulations forget that they are hired to solve problems. They come to believe that their job is to write regulations, a belief often fostered by their superiors.

So, they write regulations. Some serve a useful purpose. Some don’t. A fish faces extinction. Its role in the ecosystem, as it might affect homo sapiens, isn’t understood. A detailed and complex set of protecting the species of fish lands in the State of Arkansas. The regulations require complex and costly reporting requirements despite the fact that the particular species can’t exist in this temperate zone. The job, see, is to write regulations and someone has fulfilled the mandate.

Regulations from the first and last of the evolutionary epochs withstand attempts at revocation. The industries still benefitting still protect the first. Special interest groups fight “tooth and toenail” to protect the last.

It is the middle group of regulatory barriers that fall like trees before the bulldozers. They are the ones that protect us and the planet. They are the ones that would protect future generations They deserve our concern. All we can do at present is watch them fall.

Yeah. It's a pain in the keister.