One man's regulation is another man's protection.
So the regulation that you can't drive with a blood alcohol level above a certain number restricts your freedom. The regulation that you cannot dump lead and other poisons into the stream in back of your factory means you have more expense to avoid doing that.
The way politicians use the word "regulation" is pejorative: a regulation is something unreasonable, something which keeps the innovative and the energetic and the aggressive harnessed and reigned in. To be against regulation is to be against the rule makers, the government, that thing which does not promote freedom but suppresses it.
There's a regulation that you have to brush the snow off your car roof so it doesn't blow off and splat on the windshield of the driver behind you. Is that a regulation the government uses to impair freedom, or to protect people?
And banks bellow and moan about regulations which dictate how much money they have to keep on hand to cover bad loans. That regulatory scheme was put in when bankers demonstrated during the financial crisis that if they were not brought under control they would not just harm themselves in the conflagration they'd started but they would start the fire which burned down all the rest of the economy.
Oh, save us all from regulations!
On the other hand, the government has been known to engage in some pretty stupid regulatory practices: when I ran a private medical practice we were informed we could no longer do stool guaiacs in our office, until we got a license. The stool guaiac is a simple test for blood done a smear of stool which you procure with a simple rectal exam and every intern carried a pack of cards for this purpose on his hospital rounds. You dropped the testing solution on the stool sample and if it turned green, there was blood in the stool. Hard to screw up that test. Now we needed to satisfy a regulation to allow us to do this simple test.
The back story was there was a TV news story about a lady in Maryland who had a Pap smear read as normal, incorrectly, and she died of cervical cancer, which the Pap smear technician simply misread. Reading Pap smears is not like stool guaiac tests: You need to be able to recognize bad cells visually, looking at them through a microscope.
Barbara Mikulski, the Senator from Maryland, who had a degree in social work, but not in medical science, decided this should never happen again and she declared Maryland would become a model for high quality medical testing and she got the CLIA act passed into law, the clinical laboratories act, which required that even lab tests done in local doctor's offices be certified as being accurately done by people who had passed some sort of certification test (a boon for the certifying racket.)
Once the government got to regulating lab tests, they went wild. I actually talked to a state legislator, who told me she had 3,000 bills to vote on that session and she voted for the CLIA bill because she was told it would save lives by ensuring the quality of Pap smears.
It turned out there were so many tests like the stool guaiac and urine dipsticks which could hardly be done improperly if you tried, that they started exempting certain tests. So a stupid law with stupid regulations attached got some tweaks, but you still needed to pay your annual fee of $150 for "a license to not have a license" as the CLIA official explained to me.
I asked this CLIA official about how they inspected labs in doctor's offices across the state--there must be tens of thousands--and he told me there were 12 inspectors for the entire state of Maryland. So we now had a law, a license and a regulation, but the goal of ensuring quality of Pap smears was completely lost. It was all theater. Politicians could say they were lifesavers. They had passed a law to protect women.
They passed a CLIA law in various states and then they passed a federal CLIA law. So you needed a federal certificate ($150) and a state certificate ($150.) This made Senator Mikulski happy. She probably really believed she had accomplished something. I'm betting she really did not want to know the truth about that.
Barbara was not a bad Senator, but if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail and if you are a Senator every bad outcome that makes TV news looks like something which a law ought to control.
"There outta be a law!"
Then comes the reaction: "There's too many regulations!"
Republicans, of course, have decried this mentality. The classic Republican stance was embodied in Milton Friedman, the economist, who insisted we didn't need a Food and Drug Administration to ensure the safety of drugs. The makers of bad drugs would be sued out of existence. The marketplace and the courts would suffice. Of course, that could happen only after people were hurt--as in the case of thalidomide. Friedman took the extreme stance which was ideologically appealing to businessmen who wanted hands off, but it was silly. Some regulations are important. Many are stupid.
Here's my current favorite stupid regulation: To get a driver's license in the state of New Hampshire you must bring your passport and your original Social Security card. I presented these to the DMV official and she told me my Social Security card was unacceptable because I had laminated it. "I got that card 50 years ago," I told her, "If I hadn't laminated it, it would crumble to dust in your hand."
"I don't make the rules," she said. "Don't kill the messenger."
No driver's license for me that day. I had to go scrounge up my W-2 form, which for some reason was satisfactory. Lucky for me I am no longer self employed and I actually get a W-2 form. Otherwise, I'd be riding my bicycle everywhere.
This next thing has nothing to do with the topic of regulations, but just to show you how people can change when they get into Congress, here's Barbara Mikulski before she got elected:
America is not a melting pot. It is a sizzling cauldron for the ethnic American who feels that he has been politically courted and legally extorted by both government and private enterprise. The ethnic American is sick of being stereotyped as a racist and dullard by phony white liberals, pseudo black militants and patronizing bureaucrats. He pays the bill for every major government program and gets nothing or little in the way of return. Tricked by the political rhetoric of the illusionary funding for black-oriented social programs, he turns his anger to race — when he himself is the victim of class prejudice.
[He] has worked hard all his life to become a 'good American;' he and his sons have fought on every battlefield — then he is made fun of because he likes the flag. The ethnic American is overtaxed and underserved at every level of government. He does not have fancy lawyers or expensive lobbyists getting him tax breaks on his income. Being a home owner, he shoulders the rising property taxes — the major revenue source for the municipalities in which he lives. Yet he enjoys very little from these unfair and burdensome levies.
... [T]he ethnic American also feels unappreciated for the contribution he makes to society. He resents the way the working class is looked down upon. In many instances he is treated like the machine he operates or the pencil he pushes. He is tired of being treated like an object of production. The public and private institutions have made him frustrated by their lack of response to his needs. At present he feels powerless in his daily dealings with and efforts to change them
(Wikipedia)
Which just goes to show that politicians get elected when they know how to push the right buttons, and Donald Trump didn't discover anything new; Steve Bannon did not come up with an original formula. Barbara Mikulski knew about resentment politics long ago.
Now President Trump wants two regulations expunged for every one new regulation. That ought to make the simpletons smile.
Of course, you can get rid of stupid regulations which affect very few people and introduce a stupid new regulation which affects large numbers. How about we do away with the law which says car wash owners have to recirculate their water and in return we add a 25 cents a gallon gas tax? Or how about we do away with the regulation that milk has to be stamped with an expiration date, which will help the farmers, but then we take away the regulation that requires corn alcohol be added to every gallon of gas? How do you think the corn growers would like that swap?
So the regulation that you can't drive with a blood alcohol level above a certain number restricts your freedom. The regulation that you cannot dump lead and other poisons into the stream in back of your factory means you have more expense to avoid doing that.
The way politicians use the word "regulation" is pejorative: a regulation is something unreasonable, something which keeps the innovative and the energetic and the aggressive harnessed and reigned in. To be against regulation is to be against the rule makers, the government, that thing which does not promote freedom but suppresses it.
There's a regulation that you have to brush the snow off your car roof so it doesn't blow off and splat on the windshield of the driver behind you. Is that a regulation the government uses to impair freedom, or to protect people?
And banks bellow and moan about regulations which dictate how much money they have to keep on hand to cover bad loans. That regulatory scheme was put in when bankers demonstrated during the financial crisis that if they were not brought under control they would not just harm themselves in the conflagration they'd started but they would start the fire which burned down all the rest of the economy.
Oh, save us all from regulations!
On the other hand, the government has been known to engage in some pretty stupid regulatory practices: when I ran a private medical practice we were informed we could no longer do stool guaiacs in our office, until we got a license. The stool guaiac is a simple test for blood done a smear of stool which you procure with a simple rectal exam and every intern carried a pack of cards for this purpose on his hospital rounds. You dropped the testing solution on the stool sample and if it turned green, there was blood in the stool. Hard to screw up that test. Now we needed to satisfy a regulation to allow us to do this simple test.
The back story was there was a TV news story about a lady in Maryland who had a Pap smear read as normal, incorrectly, and she died of cervical cancer, which the Pap smear technician simply misread. Reading Pap smears is not like stool guaiac tests: You need to be able to recognize bad cells visually, looking at them through a microscope.
Barbara Mikulski, the Senator from Maryland, who had a degree in social work, but not in medical science, decided this should never happen again and she declared Maryland would become a model for high quality medical testing and she got the CLIA act passed into law, the clinical laboratories act, which required that even lab tests done in local doctor's offices be certified as being accurately done by people who had passed some sort of certification test (a boon for the certifying racket.)
Once the government got to regulating lab tests, they went wild. I actually talked to a state legislator, who told me she had 3,000 bills to vote on that session and she voted for the CLIA bill because she was told it would save lives by ensuring the quality of Pap smears.
It turned out there were so many tests like the stool guaiac and urine dipsticks which could hardly be done improperly if you tried, that they started exempting certain tests. So a stupid law with stupid regulations attached got some tweaks, but you still needed to pay your annual fee of $150 for "a license to not have a license" as the CLIA official explained to me.
I asked this CLIA official about how they inspected labs in doctor's offices across the state--there must be tens of thousands--and he told me there were 12 inspectors for the entire state of Maryland. So we now had a law, a license and a regulation, but the goal of ensuring quality of Pap smears was completely lost. It was all theater. Politicians could say they were lifesavers. They had passed a law to protect women.
They passed a CLIA law in various states and then they passed a federal CLIA law. So you needed a federal certificate ($150) and a state certificate ($150.) This made Senator Mikulski happy. She probably really believed she had accomplished something. I'm betting she really did not want to know the truth about that.
Barbara was not a bad Senator, but if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail and if you are a Senator every bad outcome that makes TV news looks like something which a law ought to control.
"There outta be a law!"
Then comes the reaction: "There's too many regulations!"
Republicans, of course, have decried this mentality. The classic Republican stance was embodied in Milton Friedman, the economist, who insisted we didn't need a Food and Drug Administration to ensure the safety of drugs. The makers of bad drugs would be sued out of existence. The marketplace and the courts would suffice. Of course, that could happen only after people were hurt--as in the case of thalidomide. Friedman took the extreme stance which was ideologically appealing to businessmen who wanted hands off, but it was silly. Some regulations are important. Many are stupid.
Here's my current favorite stupid regulation: To get a driver's license in the state of New Hampshire you must bring your passport and your original Social Security card. I presented these to the DMV official and she told me my Social Security card was unacceptable because I had laminated it. "I got that card 50 years ago," I told her, "If I hadn't laminated it, it would crumble to dust in your hand."
"I don't make the rules," she said. "Don't kill the messenger."
No driver's license for me that day. I had to go scrounge up my W-2 form, which for some reason was satisfactory. Lucky for me I am no longer self employed and I actually get a W-2 form. Otherwise, I'd be riding my bicycle everywhere.
This next thing has nothing to do with the topic of regulations, but just to show you how people can change when they get into Congress, here's Barbara Mikulski before she got elected:
America is not a melting pot. It is a sizzling cauldron for the ethnic American who feels that he has been politically courted and legally extorted by both government and private enterprise. The ethnic American is sick of being stereotyped as a racist and dullard by phony white liberals, pseudo black militants and patronizing bureaucrats. He pays the bill for every major government program and gets nothing or little in the way of return. Tricked by the political rhetoric of the illusionary funding for black-oriented social programs, he turns his anger to race — when he himself is the victim of class prejudice.
[He] has worked hard all his life to become a 'good American;' he and his sons have fought on every battlefield — then he is made fun of because he likes the flag. The ethnic American is overtaxed and underserved at every level of government. He does not have fancy lawyers or expensive lobbyists getting him tax breaks on his income. Being a home owner, he shoulders the rising property taxes — the major revenue source for the municipalities in which he lives. Yet he enjoys very little from these unfair and burdensome levies.
... [T]he ethnic American also feels unappreciated for the contribution he makes to society. He resents the way the working class is looked down upon. In many instances he is treated like the machine he operates or the pencil he pushes. He is tired of being treated like an object of production. The public and private institutions have made him frustrated by their lack of response to his needs. At present he feels powerless in his daily dealings with and efforts to change them
(Wikipedia)
Which just goes to show that politicians get elected when they know how to push the right buttons, and Donald Trump didn't discover anything new; Steve Bannon did not come up with an original formula. Barbara Mikulski knew about resentment politics long ago.
Now President Trump wants two regulations expunged for every one new regulation. That ought to make the simpletons smile.
Of course, you can get rid of stupid regulations which affect very few people and introduce a stupid new regulation which affects large numbers. How about we do away with the law which says car wash owners have to recirculate their water and in return we add a 25 cents a gallon gas tax? Or how about we do away with the regulation that milk has to be stamped with an expiration date, which will help the farmers, but then we take away the regulation that requires corn alcohol be added to every gallon of gas? How do you think the corn growers would like that swap?
Phantom,
ReplyDeleteWhat's both amazing and depressing is that Mikulski stated the above nearly 50 years ago-not a lot of progress in that arena-the sizzling cauldron remains and elected Trump..
As for regulations-interesting that so many folks are opposed to them, yet are in favor of clean air, clean water, a safe food supply etc. Oh yes, for these we can all thank the free market-or leprechauns-but certainly not regulations...Yikes-think mandatory remedial history lessons would fly..
Maud
Maud,
ReplyDeleteLike the Merrimack River, the Potomac River was a cesspool in the 1950's as industry polluted the waters and treated those rivers like their own private toilets. Now both have fish, and are success stories Industries along the river did not die out--they simply had to spend some money. Automobiles are now far better and more reliable than the gas guzzlers, polluters of the 1950's, and all this was not thwarted by regulations. All this happened through regulation. Rachel Carson sounded the alarm and DDT got regulated, without increasing mosquito borne diseases. Democrats never seem to answer with success stories of regulations that worked.
There could be more success stories connected to solar panels on everyone's roof and windmills.
Phantom