Fighting for freedom can seem like a lonely endeavor. But many of us often receive great reminders of just how many good people also are working with us in the proverbial “trenches”, and, over the past two months, we most definitely have.
In November, the free-market team at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released a devastating new edition of its annual “Ten Thousand Commandments” report, which not only sheds light on the vast scope of the federal “regulatory” state (i.e. the width of the threatening DC target-scope), but also looks at time-oriented trends and offers solutions to combat the political burdens on liberty, economy, and living standards.
And now, C. Wayne Crews, CEI’s Fred L. Smith, Jr. Fellow, has brought deserved attention to another powerful report from the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) -- a report that might be even more stunning because it represents an appeal from the very business people and employees who are trying to affordably offer us what we want.
Released a month after the alarming CEI report, and entitled “The Cost of Federal Regulations” this NAM study lays things out in plain and shocking terms:
“The NAM’s benchmark Cost of Federal Regulations study finds that the total cost of complying with federal regulations in 2022 is an estimated $3.079 trillion (in 2023 dollars), an amount equal to 12% of U.S. GDP and larger than the manufacturing sector’s entire economic output.”
That last portion might get some of your leftist neighbors to open their eyes… Or perhaps it won’t, because many leftists long have thirsted for government to command private business and meddle in other people’s lives. The fact that political mandates – government mandates, alone, apart from corporate income taxes, tariffs on portions of their production materials, and literal blocks on energy that also could lower expenses – actually cost manufacturers more than the output of those manufacturers is so stunning it’s almost hard to conceptualize.
But a few added takes give readers a good grasp.
NAM points out that this $3.079 trillion burden on hard working people and consumers can be broken down to: $277,000 in average compliance costs for each US-based business, $29,100 per employee when looking at ALL manufacturers, and $50,100 per employee within small businesses (those with 50 or fewer employees).
Those costs represent opportunities that have been stolen by politicians who, rather than embracing peace and opening their own businesses under the conditions they promote as “good,” instead decide to break the US Constitution and flout fundamental ethics by imposing their ideas on others.
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These burdens are not isolated. Politicians and bureaucrats pile them atop the oft-unspoken burden of the US debt, the price-pushing Federal Reserve money-printing enacted to buy US bonds (and facilitate more US spending) and the perverse incentives both the inflation of the money supply and pork handouts inspire on every level from military spending, to government-run education, to university grants, to bailouts, to “Climate Change” scam projects, to Planned Parenthood and other international “organizations,” to the ill-gotten salaries of the parasitic politicians and bureaucrats themselves. In fact, as economist and professor Peter St. Onge recently noted, 56 percent of new jobs are not growing in the free market, but are due to government parasitism.
As CEIC Data (not affiliated with CEI) notes, the debt-to-GDP ratio that such reckless, corrupt miscreant spending and mandates together manifest is utterly astounding. The September tally of government debt was 123-percent of nominal GDP, and this requires observers to remember that the Gross Domestic Product would be higher if not for the $3.079 trillion (that was for 2022, it’s likely going to come to much more for 2023) in “regulatory” economic drag calculated by NAM.
Writes Wayne Crews:
“Officialdom stopped performing an aggregate annual regulatory cost estimate like the NAM one two decades ago, shortly after it became a requirement in a 1999 law called the Regulatory Right-to-Know Act. Several turn-of-the-century-era cost estimates appeared back then, from the GAO (Government Accountability Office), the Office of Management and Budget and the Small Business Administration, all of which should be resurrected.
Costs of regulation come in several species and blends: the NAM report, using a combination of bottom-up approaches as well as top-down regression modeling rooted in ‘academic literature finding that macroeconomic performance and living standards are systematically linked to regulatory policies,’ breaks 2023’s regulatory costs down this way:
- Economic: $2.067 trillion
- Environmental: $588 billion
- Occupational Safety/Heath & Homeland Security: $124 billion
- Tax Compliance: $300 billion”
I should note that these are the consequential – the practical – burdens on manufacturers, potential employees who will not be hired, and on consumers. This focus on the outcome is important, as Crews observes:
“Economic regulations topping $2 trillion constitute by far the largest regulatory cost component in this reckoning. These rules affect decision making in, for example, ‘markets for final goods and services, markets for physical and human resources, credit markets and markets for the transport and delivery of products and factors of production.’ This vast category of interventions ‘affect who can produce, what can (or cannot) be produced, how to produce, where to produce, where to sell, input and product pricing and what product information must be or cannot be provided’ according to the NAM.”
Indeed, the opportunity costs are incalculable – and that observation leads us to a final truism.
This is not solely about the terrible economic outcomes of government impositions. It is about the underlying predicate, the immoral activity of politicians imposing their mandates in the first place. That, alone, is enough to inspire absolute opposition by those who believe in peace.
The consequences are disastrous, but the fundamental disaster is the widespread lack of knowledge about, and opposition to, such immorality. The act of imposing one’s will on others is unquestionably immoral, and from there, the terrible results always follow.
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