userque wrote:
Yes, you pointed to the sheer numbers and said "SEE!! THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM!! LOOK AT ALL THOSE REGULATIONS!!!"
My response was basically that having many laws is not, in and of itself, a problem. We have a lot of laws, regulations, and codes on the books for people and businesses. If they are necessary, then they are necessary.
Who decides that they are necessary? Faceless bureaucrats? People with an ax to grind (ex: people who are pro-green, and so join the EPA and institute pro-green regulations)? People who want to justify their paycheck (ex: OSHA people who focus ever-more scrutiny on the workplace when the majority of workplaces are plenty safe already)? Just because the law / regulation is on the books doesn't mean that it's necessary. Why am I being asked to prove a negative?
Why is the default view that if a regulation is on the books then there is a need for it? The default view should be that if there is no significant, positive, provable, tangible, meaningful, unbiased outcome or purpose for the regulation, then it shouldn't exist. And even if the regulation does meet the aforementioned things, then does that benefit outweigh the costs incurred by businesses / private individuals? If not, then it's not necessary. That's why the merits / costs / benefits of each and every law / regulation, etc should be discussed and debated on the floor of Congress, not created in an office someplace by some unaccountable government employee on a whim.
Example: You can't legislate good moral behavior, so having rules requiring businesses to prove - via reams of paperwork - that they aren't behaving in a discriminatory manner won't stop them from having discriminatory beliefs (or using inherent loopholes in the system to act in a discriminatory way). It takes an inspection looking at things besides all that paperwork to prove or disprove an EEO complaint. Since that paperwork isn't serving a meaningful purpose, it can safely be disposed of.
(Side note: Acts are laws.) You didn't say why it's unnecessary.
It's unnecessary because it provides the means of shifting the responsibility from the ones who originally approved the loan (the original lender) to those who didn't (the taxpayer via Fannie / Freddie). This is not a necessary - or morally copacetic - activity. Ergo, scrap it.
(Side note: Laws aren't regulations.) The tax law is necessary. Your position was to eliminate unnecessary regulations; not that convoluted laws should be revamped.
Here's the simple answer: flat tax. Everybody (individuals and businesses alike) pays the same equal rate on all earnings / profits, regardless of source. No tax write-offs for anybody or anything. Government takes it's cut of the GDP, and the process is complete. The regulations in this kind of process could be accomplished in 100 pages or less. That renders all the thousands of pages of tax law / regulations on the books meaningless and uneeded.
Aitrus wrote:- The ACA added a ton of new data collection and reporting requirements for businesses. For example, businesses with 50 or more employees must file 1095-C forms with the IRS for every worker showing that they have health insurance coverage meeting the ACA's minimum essential coverage requirements. Not sure if this has been remedied with the recent changes of ACA in Congress over the last few years, but I doubt it.
Again, why do you feel it is unnecessary? (Again, you are revamping.)
What problem is solved with this paperwork requirement? If none, then it's unnecessary. I argue that the ACA does not solve a legitimate problem, and thus the paperwork required to ensure compliance with it is unnecessary. It's an example of government regulation adding costs to businesses, where before the ACA this cost did not exist. The problem with just assuming that the government has the right to levy random requirements on businesses is that it costs money for businesses to meet the requirements. For businesses that are on the bubble profit-wise, the costs of meeting a regulation can be enough to put them out of business. How is that equitable?
First of all, it's not a burden at all, unless a company has no computers.
Proper interpretation of the data is a different issue. And if it's being done incorrectly, the solution is to do it correctly.
The data is necessary for the proper operation of the agency charged to protect employees and potential employees from ... that's right ... business. If employers never discriminated, there'd be no EEOC.
Any additional regulation that must be met must also cost an employer manhours. There is always a burden when meeting documentation requirements, tracking and logging requirements, etc. A computer might make it quicker and simpler than in the past, but the cost is there nonetheless.
As for the EEOC - I'll repeat: you can't legislate morally correct behavior. You can punish it, but companies shouldn't have to continually prove that they're not discriminating. The default view shouldn't be a "in lack of evidence to the contrary, businesses are discriminating" kind of position, which is what regulations of this kind take by their purpose and design. Since this makes no logical sense and adds no value, these kinds of regulations are not necessary.
Now, the EEOC doesn't really need to exist either - it has lost it's purpose. It's original purpose was to investigate claims during an era when few other public agencies or private entities existed to do so. Yes, discrimination still exists, and some of the thousands of EEOC claims filed every year do have merit. However, there are many thousands of attorneys in private practice available to pursue / prosecute those claims that have merit. There are also state and city human relations commissions whose functions are the same as the EEOC's.
Doing something that one individual deems "simple," doesn't mean that that "simple" act won't have a detrimental effect to a national resource. Also, that individual could be an idiot.
Yes, that person might be an idiot, but he still has property rights, and he can be an idiot on his land all he wants. And if a resource is on private land, then it's not a "national resource," it's a private one. Yes, we should stop somebody from digging a hole down to the water table and dumping in a bunch of chemicals down into it. But that doesn't mean that every person who wants to build a shed in his backyard needs to get a permit to do so. There's a difference between common sense and overreach. Punish the guy after he does it, but there's no need to punish the neighbor with extra fees to do something harmless on his own land. Besides, please explain how a permit prevents somebody from ignoring the permit and doing whatever he wants to do anyway?
Again, make an argument as to how this is not necessary. Automation caused many job losses, but automation is necessary. Netflix/Internet killed Blockbuster. The internet is necessary.
Protection of people and resources costs money. Period. No way around it. Either we let business do whatever they want, at the cost of people and resources; or we regulate, at a cost to business. Regulations started from the need. After businesses showed how corrupt they can be.
Automation isn't necessary in most cases - it's a business choice. And I thought that Redbox started killing Blockbuster before Netflix ever did? And I guarantee that the world would keep turning if the internet suddenly ceased to exist. Yes, it would be a hard transition, but we would end up doing fine in the long run. The internet is a convenience, a "want" - not a "need".
Some regulations do indeed start from need. But what regulations exist today that didn't exist 20 years ago, and what need drove them? How have they improved things? At a certain point, will we ever finally have all the regulations we need, and don't need to create any more? At what point would you be considered a conservative on the whole argument of regulation (meaning, at what point would you argue for less regulation)?
But at what point do the costs to business outweigh the dubious benefits of regulation? If we don't create restrictions on the government, then it will run roughshod over private individuals with reams and reams of regulatory requirements out of a need to control everything...wait a minute...isn't that what's happening? Just like our forefathers when they fought against the damn Redcoats. Hmm...how can we fix this...if only there were some kind of limit to keep government from running amok...wait, what's this thing with "Constitution" written across the top? Hmm...interesting...there's a list here in Article 1, Section 8...there's 17 things that Congress is allowed to do...maybe it means that whatever isn't on this list, then Congress isn't authorized to do it? Makes sense...hmm...I don't see anything here where it allows Congress to delegate it's law-creating powers to the Executive Branch - it even gives power specifically to Congress to create the laws, including things like item 3 - to regulate Commerce. I guess that means that Congress has the responsibility to regulate commerce and not the Executive...ooo-lookey here! This thing called the 10th Amendment says that Congress can't do anything other than what is listed in this document, and that everything else is delegated to the states or the People. And the 9th article says that just because rights retained by the People aren't specifically listed in the Constitution doesn't mean that the government can't use this fact to deny those unlisted rights to the People. Interesting! Maybe this means that property owners and business owners can't have their rights trampled upon just because the term "property rights" doesn't appear in the Constitution. This puts the whole situation in a different light...like maybe the government is limited in it's powers, that it has no power except what's listed in the document, that it's supposed to divide what power it does have in very specific ways among the Branches, and that it's supposed to work for the People in order to protect their rights instead of trampling on them. Gee, I wonder what happened...it seemed like such a good idea...
Sorry for the snarky tone...I got a little carried away there for a moment. But I think you get my drift. I feel strongly that most modern government activities - regulations, dozens of Executive branch agencies, Congress abdicating it's duty to create laws and have a balanced budget - fall outside Constitutional boundaries.
What's the alternative? Are you saying the limits are unnecessary? Why?
Why is an alternative needed? The limits aren't needed because they serve no functional purpose, and serve only to increase costs.
Again, the paperwork is necessary for OSHA.
Why? What is accomplished by completing the paperwork? What disaster is prevented that is otherwise guaranteed to occur without this mountain of paperwork? What makes the paperwork / regulations necessary?
Do you just send money to the IRS, or tell them how much they should send you? Or do you have to document things? At a cost to you?
Why?
For enforcement purposes, because you could be lying without being forced to document.
No, I could be lying on the documentation. And yet those who lie on OSHA paperwork (or get it wrong by mistake) don't have people dying by the thousands because they didn't have the proper MSDS for methyl-ethyl-death in each workcenter's safety binder. They just get fined up the wazoo as if they actually did have thousands dying from their shoddy safety practices.
Here's a crazy thought...what if there were fewer regulations? Maybe then there wouldn't be all that documentation, and all those fines for not documenting compliance with excessive, unnecessary documentations might just disappear.
That same logic applies to many, if not all, of your examples.
Yep - the logic of requiring the companies to prove a negative. To prove that they aren't breaking laws or harming their workers - even if they never had (and never would have) intent to break laws, cheat customers, or harm their employees. Government regulation is a heavy-handed approach designed to punish everybody because a few did something stupid (or somebody feared that somebody would do something stupid). It's making everybody in the country wear a diaper because some idiot in Des Moines pooped his pants, and so now everybody has to buy government-approved diapers on their own dime, keep the diaper purchase receipts to prove they were purchased, document proper disposal of soiled diapers in the approved manner (again on their own dime), and document their employee's annual diaper safety training.
I shouldn't have to prove that a government agency that operates like that is unnecessary to the functioning of a healthy economy or society, yet here we are.
Well, I do agree that unnecessary laws/regulations/codes should be done away with. But I don't think that they should be willy-nilly done away with.
Before calling off with its head on a law etc., first understand why the law etc. was created in the first place.
Sorry, wrote most of this post as I was reading your replies, so I might have been repeating myself above (or preaching to the choir a bit). Glad to know that you think there's regulations that should be done away with.
Too bad we can't do both - prove that the regulation is needed before it's implemented / published on the Federal Register, and make agencies prove that a documented is needed in order to keep it on the books. Maybe once every few years or so that should be a practice - make agencies justify each and every single reg on the CFR, and those that don't pass muster are scrapped.
