Washington is stifling economic liberties.

• Author: Duesenberg, Richard W.

THE COST of government regulation is truly staggering. It also is a barometer of how free Americans are to pursue their own interests and determine the course of their lives.

In the late 1970s, Washington University's Center for the Study of American Business estimated that the total annual cost of implementing government regulations was about $64,000,000,000. By the late 1980s, its estimate had more than doubled to $137,000,000,000. Other studies reveal even starker figures. The Rochester Institute of Technology estimated in 1990 that Federal regulations were costing Americans $395-510,000,000,000, approximately $4,100 to $5,400 per household, each year.

Financial costs are not the only burden. Regulations also result in a tremendous loss of one of our most valuable and limited resources--time. In the 1980s, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget reported that the private sector was spending more than 5,000,000,000 hours a year just to meet government paperwork demands. It is devoting even more time on compliance in the 1990s. It is no wonder that regulation serves to discourage the creation of new businesses, jobs, products, and services.

Today, every single aspect of business activity requires seeking the approval of one or more government agencies. Businessmen may not even interview job applicants without first knowing all the Federal and state regulations that govern the process. These determine whom they may interview, what questions they may ask, and how they may determine an applicant's qualifications. Regulations also dictate to the people seeking jobs, from stipulating the number of hours they may work to limiting the kind of work they may perform.

Looking to invest in a business? You need an attorney to help sort through all the complex regulations related to raising and investing capital. Erecting or remodeling a building? If you are very lucky, you will get a permit, but then be prepared for even more costly restrictions. Setting salaries or other compensation? Consult your lawyer again to find out all the regulations on minimum benefit levels, nondiscrimination, selective disclosures, etc. Developing a product? Send tons of reports to the government and cross your fingers in the hope that you will get permission to sell it--within a decade, that is. Setting a price? Not without checking with the state to see if it considers that price "fair" and "equitable." That's just getting started in your new business--it is even tougher to stay in business.

Each of us is affected--intimately--every day by regulation. Without approval from the government, we can not drive an automobile; establish a school to educate our children; make the smallest improvement to our home or other property; or practice any profession. We can not even contract an illness without being reported to some bureaucratic authority. Meanwhile, of course, up to half of what we earn is confiscated by local, state, and Federal tax collectors.

Government control over our lives has increased as protections of our economic liberties have decreased. This is a fairly recent phenomenon. Throughout most of the nation's history, Americans have been free from the heavy yoke of regulation. We have viewed government with suspicion, and we have been protected from government, not by government. We also have recognized that there is no meaningful freedom without freedom of enterprise--that our political and economic liberties are interdependent.

More than 200 years ago, economic liberties were foremost in the minds of the framers of the Constitution. In Federalist, No. 10, James Madison argued that men have different "faculties"--i.e., different talents and abilities--and that is why property rights are essential: "From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results." He emphasized, "The protection of these faculties is the first object of government."

Madison furthermore criticized the "rage" for "an equal distribution of property," and condemned it as an "improper or...