Biden Takes George III’s Imperial Approach to Regulation | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Jon Sanders.

    Along with being one of the greatest documents for human liberty ever created, the Declaration of Independence provided an extensive list of how King George III had abused and usurped Great Britain's American subjects' rights under God and the law. One of those charges decried the economy-crippling harassment of the people by the king's bureaucratic functionaries. The Declaration stated:

    He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

    Swarms of officers to harass people and eat out their substance

    My recent column in The Daily Caller laments "our great shame that those words so accurately depict the regulatory apparatus of the United States of America now." Complying with regulatory burdens destroys wealth rather than grows it, as I explained:

    Regulatory compliance requires lots of paperwork, takes many would-be profitable transactions and renders them infeasible or not worthwhile, and often requires businesses to add expensive new equipment or systems. In other words, it wastes productive labor and capital on busy work and bureaucracy that has zero to little economic value for a business or its would-be customers. The business bears the costs of compliance directly; its potential customers, indirectly. It is a textbook example of what economists call "deadweight loss," a form of wealth destruction.

    Just how much of our substance do federal regulations consume? I wrote:

    The 2022 edition of Clyde Wayne Crews' annual snapshot of the federal regulatory state, "Ten Thousand Commandments," estimated that the total cost of federal regulations on the Nation's economy was $1.927 trillion. If that was a country's GDP, it would beat out Italy as the eighth largest economy in the world. Crews estimated that households essentially paid "$14,684 annually on average in a hidden regulatory tax."

    What's worse, however, is that the Biden administration seeks to weaponize the regulatory state against the people. Case in point: who upon reading "swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance" doesn't think of Biden's 87,000 new IRS agents?

    Crews noted that "Biden's repudiation of the Trump deregulatory agenda is thorough." My article included several examples outside of Biden's functionaries removing even such beneficial deregulatory measures as "one-in/two-out" rulemaking (making agencies retire two old rules before adding a new one) and sunset with periodic review:

• A proposed new rule by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would require public companies to report their "climate-related risks and impacts." The SEC estimates that this rule alone would raise the annual cost of compliance to those businesses by $3.8 billion to $10.2 billion.
• On September 6, 2022, the National Labor Relations Board proposed classifying employers who use people from staffing firms, franchisees, vendors, contractors, etc., as "joint employers." It would raise firm costs and chill hiring and such contractual arrangements by making many secondary employers suddenly liable to union pressures, collective bargaining, and picketing, and also to being held responsible for illegal labor practices by the other employer. The workers would also then be subject to involuntary union dues withholding.
• On October 13, 2022, the Department of Labor took direct aim at the gig economy, getting rid of another Trump-era worker protection by proposing to reclassify most independent contractors as "employees." The rule would destroy worker independence in fields across the economy, ranging from trucking, consulting, ride-sharing, and writing to a host of service industries.
• The Keystone XL pipeline project, which Biden proudly killed on his first day of office by revocation of a permit, would have employed 10,400 Americans and be operational in 2023. Think of that this winter.