The bureaucratization of everything.

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: Political Landscape

REGULATION, like the work of a boa constrictor, wraps itself around the U.S. economy and restricts freedom of action, imposing costly burdens that threaten the survival of the American market. Federal bureaucracy coerces and cajoles every person, diminishing freedom to invent, produce, and sell, reducing consumer choice, and creating governmentally planned economies.

In the Obama Administration, the Federal agencies are headed by individuals predisposed to exercise control over markets and regulate them with a vengeance. Those individuals harbor grave suspicions about the private sector and think it prone to failure and abuse unless kept firmly under Federal control. The economies produced as a result of regulatory enforcement are inefficient, failing to meet the best and highest uses. Those economies carry with them ever higher levels of unemployment and loss of private revenue. The bureaucratization of everything private is enslaving and progressively destroying all productive enterprise, particularly small and mid-sized businesses and new market entrants, while rapidly transforming previously vibrant markets into dull and dysfunctional ones that neither can innovate nor employ those with talent.

The squeeze is on with the Federal government aiming to increase taxes on the most productive elements of society, while simultaneously imposing economic burdens and limitations on free choice through thousands of Federal rules and a new emphasis on enforcement against the noncompliant, including asset forfeitures, seizure actions, and civil and criminal prosecutions. While taxes take the wealth that otherwise would be saved, invested, or spent, regulations limit freedom of choice, increasing the cost of production, goods, and services; diminishing the profitability of every enterprise; and limiting consumer choice in the market. Regulations also impose significant barriers to market entry and force many firms out of existence, depleting wealth, eliminating opportunity, and adding to unemployment.

Since the start of the Obama Administration, there has been an 18% jump in the number of Federal regulatory agencies and a 13% increase in employment at the agencies. According to a Policy Backgrounder by Heritage Foundation senior fellow James L Gattuso entitled "Red Tape Rising," since 2009, the Federal agencies have adopted 106 new "major" or "significant" regulations (i.e., those with an estimated economic impact of $100,000,000 or more) at an...