The thing driving up the cost of your life isn’t the rule that kept the chemical plant out of your drinking water; it’s the accounting trick that treats the cost of keeping you alive as a paperwork burden to be slashed. In The Lessons of Alan Greenspan’s Life at National Review, Ryan Young and Hayden Stolzenberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute argue that the secret to American affordability is deleting the rulebook. They praise Idaho’s “zero-based regulating” — the scheme that sunsets every rule and forces the agency to justify it from scratch — and the repeal of the EPA’s Endangerment Finding as twin triumphs, claiming that slashing the federal regulatory code is the most reliable route to prosperity for working families.
I will concede the easy part, because I am tired of people waiting for me to dodge it. The federal code is bloated. A 1970s mandate on the exact fat content of margarine is stupid. Occupational licensing for hair braiding is absolutely a racket, designed by incumbent salons to keep competitors out and working-class women paying fees for permission to hold a comb. Idaho’s Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses cut 649 pages of that, and good. Forcing a bureaucracy to sunset its rules and actually defend its existence is a healthy shock. I will gladly hand them the margarine and the hair-braiding.
Now watch the trick. The $2 trillion figure Young cites for the cost of federal regulation is the cost businesses pay to comply with rules. That’s all it counts. It does not subtract what the rules prevent. It doesn’t ask whether the alternative to a regulation is a poisoned river, a hospital bill for an asthma attack, a workplace injury that ends a career, a financial product that wipes out a retirement. It treats every dollar of compliance as a dollar of waste, because that’s the only way you get to two trillion and feel clean about it.
The Endangerment Finding repeal that Young celebrates at the top of the piece is the cleanest worked example. The 2009 Endangerment Finding is the legal trigger that forced the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act — starting with vehicle emissions and flowing downstream to the smokestacks pumping carbon into the sky. The Trump administration scrapped it. The cost Young counts — “hundreds of billions of dollars” — is the cost of compliance with carbon rules. The cost he does not count is the cost of letting the carbon out: more asthma, more wildfire, more crop failure, more insurance markets that stop writing policies in places where the climate has become uninsurable. The compliance cost shows up in a spreadsheet. The carbon cost shows up in your lungs and your house. He’s counting one and pretending the other doesn’t exist.
This is what Idaho’s 38 percent looks like in practice. The piece tells you page counts went down. It tells you the Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses cut 649 pages. It tells you economic-development regulations halved. It does not — not once — name a single specific regulation that was eliminated and ask whether anyone got hurt. Page count is not a measure of whether the water is drinkable. Page count is not a measure of whether the worker on the scaffold has a harness. Page count is a measure of pages.
When you cut “regulation” without asking what each rule was doing, you don’t get a more efficient economy. You get the cost that the rule was preventing, just relocated — paid by the worker who got injured, the family whose kid drank the water, the homeowner whose house burned. The Competitive Enterprise Institute does not put that cost on the other side of the ledger. Neither does Ryan Young. The reason is straightforward: if you put it on the other side, the case for cutting 38 percent of the rules gets considerably harder to make.
The trick is older than the Competitive Enterprise Institute. If a nursing home is “too expensive” to staff safely because of regulations, the cost doesn’t vanish when you fire the inspector; it moves into the bedsores of the resident and the public hospital that picks up the wreckage. If a bank is “burdened” by capital requirements, the cost doesn’t vanish when you gut the rule; it moves into the taxpayer bailout. Deregulation, in this telling, is just the freedom to push the bill onto someone who doesn’t have a legal department. The page count goes down, the spreadsheet looks clean, and somewhere down the road a family is paying for what the rule was preventing.
The honest version starts by admitting that regulation isn’t one thing. Some of it protects incumbents — occupational licensing cartels, certificate-of-need laws for hospitals, restrictions on new entry to specific trades — and that should be cut loudly, with the receipts. Some is useless paperwork — duplicate reporting, outdated forms, rules written for industries that no longer exist — and that should be cut too. And some of it internalizes harms the market would otherwise dump on the public: environmental limits, workplace safety, financial-product disclosures, the rules that turn into a healthcare bill or a flood claim or a funeral when they’re not there. Don’t cut those without naming what you’re accepting.
So what gets built instead? Not a 190,000-page federal code written by unaccountable bureaucrats, and not handing the boardroom a blank check to externalize its waste onto your lungs and your river. The real alternative is a system that sets clear, bright-line floors with actual democratic accountability, and the infrastructure to meet them. Industry-by-industry contracts where workers and employers sit in the same room and set the floor together, instead of waiting for an agency in Washington to dictate it from a filing cabinet. A tax on the dirt a developer sits on, not on the building they actually put up. A public insurance plan you can pick instead of being stuck with one private company, forcing the extractors to actually compete.
We do not need to abolish the floor just because the people who wrote the current rules made a mess. We need to own the floor. And we need to build it so it actually holds.# Cost-Shifting, Not Red Tape, Is Your Unpaid Bill
The thing driving up the cost of your life isn’t the rule that kept the chemical plant out of your drinking water; it’s the accounting trick that treats the cost of keeping you alive as a paperwork burden to be slashed. In The Lessons of Alan Greenspan’s Life at National Review, Ryan Young and Hayden Stolzenberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute argue that the secret to American affordability is deleting the rulebook. They praise Idaho’s “zero-based regulating” — the scheme that sunsets every rule and forces the agency to justify it from scratch — and the repeal of the EPA’s Endangerment Finding as twin triumphs, claiming that slashing the federal regulatory code is the most reliable route to prosperity for working families.
I will concede the easy part, because I am tired of people waiting for me to dodge it. The federal code is bloated. A 1970s mandate on the exact fat content of margarine is stupid. Occupational licensing for hair braiding is absolutely a racket, designed by incumbent salons to keep competitors out and working-class women paying fees for permission to hold a comb. Idaho’s Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses cut 649 pages of that, and good. Forcing a bureaucracy to sunset its rules and actually defend its existence is a healthy shock. I will gladly hand them the margarine and the hair-braiding.
Now watch the trick. The $2 trillion figure Young cites for the cost of federal regulation is the cost businesses pay to comply with rules. That’s all it counts. It does not subtract what the rules prevent. It doesn’t ask whether the alternative to a regulation is a poisoned river, a hospital bill for an asthma attack, a workplace injury that ends a career, a financial product that wipes out a retirement. It treats every dollar of compliance as a dollar of waste, because that’s the only way you get to two trillion and feel clean about it.
The Endangerment Finding repeal that Young celebrates at the top of the piece is the cleanest worked example. The 2009 Endangerment Finding is the legal trigger that forced the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act — starting with vehicle emissions and flowing downstream to the smokestacks pumping carbon into the sky. The Trump administration scrapped it. The cost Young counts — “hundreds of billions of dollars” — is the cost of compliance with carbon rules. The cost he does not count is the cost of letting the carbon out: more asthma, more wildfire, more crop failure, more insurance markets that stop writing policies in places where the climate has become uninsurable. The compliance cost shows up in a spreadsheet. The carbon cost shows up in your lungs and your house. He’s counting one and pretending the other doesn’t exist.
This is what Idaho’s 38 percent looks like in practice. The piece tells you page counts went down. It tells you the Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses cut 649 pages. It tells you economic-development regulations halved. It does not — not once — name a single specific regulation that was eliminated and ask whether anyone got hurt. Page count is not a measure of whether the water is drinkable. Page count is not a measure of whether the worker on the scaffold has a harness. Page count is a measure of pages.
When you cut “regulation” without asking what each rule was doing, you don’t get a more efficient economy. You get the cost that the rule was preventing, just relocated — paid by the worker who got injured, the family whose kid drank the water, the homeowner whose house burned. The Competitive Enterprise Institute does not put that cost on the other side of the ledger. Neither does Ryan Young. The reason is straightforward: if you put it on the other side, the case for cutting 38 percent of the rules gets considerably harder to make.
The trick is older than the Competitive Enterprise Institute. If a nursing home is “too expensive” to staff safely because of regulations, the cost doesn’t vanish when you fire the inspector; it moves into the bedsores of the resident and the public hospital that picks up the wreckage. If a bank is “burdened” by capital requirements, the cost doesn’t vanish when you gut the rule; it moves into the taxpayer bailout. Deregulation, in this telling, is just the freedom to push the bill onto someone who doesn’t have a legal department. The page count goes down, the spreadsheet looks clean, and somewhere down the road a family is paying for what the rule was preventing.
The honest version starts by admitting that regulation isn’t one thing. Some of it protects incumbents — occupational licensing cartels, certificate-of-need laws for hospitals, restrictions on new entry to specific trades — and that should be cut loudly, with the receipts. Some is useless paperwork — duplicate reporting, outdated forms, rules written for industries that no longer exist — and that should be cut too. And some of it internalizes harms the market would otherwise dump on the public: environmental limits, workplace safety, financial-product disclosures, the rules that turn into a healthcare bill or a flood claim or a funeral when they’re not there. Don’t cut those without naming what you’re accepting.
So what gets built instead? Not a 190,000-page federal code written by unaccountable bureaucrats, and not handing the boardroom a blank check to externalize its waste onto your lungs and your river. The real alternative is a system that sets clear, bright-line floors with actual democratic accountability, and the infrastructure to meet them. Industry-by-industry contracts where workers and employers sit in the same room and set the floor together, instead of waiting for an agency in Washington to dictate it from a filing cabinet. A tax on the dirt a developer sits on, not on the building they actually put up. A public insurance plan you can pick instead of being stuck with one private company, forcing the extractors to actually compete.
We do not need to abolish the floor just because the people who wrote the current rules made a mess. We need to own the floor. And we need to build it so it actually holds.