5Regulation: Focus on Results, Not Red Tape
Regulatory oversight is essential in an interdependent society, to safeguard against unsafe conditions and dishonest practices that people cannot readily protect against by themselves. Government must lead the effort against pandemics, just as it does in war. Freedom is enhanced when people don’t need to worry about whether the water is clean, or the toys have lead paint, or drugs are dangerous. Regulatory oversight is vital for markets to work in a global economy where buyers and sellers no longer know or trust each other. That’s the proper role of regulation—to enhance freedom by reducing fear and distrust in daily interactions.
Rigid regulatory dictates, on the other hand, can be suffocating and even counterproductive. Broad public alienation against government is due, in part, to regulatory micromanagement that prevents practical solutions and does not afford citizens the dignity of meeting public goals in their own ways. Much regulation fails not because the regulatory goals of safety and quality are invalid, but because rigid rules rarely honor real life circumstances.
Washington is clogged with legacy programs and dictates that don’t work as intended. Its dense legal structures are crushing schools, hospitals, and workplaces under unnecessary bureaucratic burdens. The cure is not wholesale de-regulation—freedom in a crowded society requires regulatory traffic cops. What’s needed is a new vision for how to regulate sensibly, providing oversight without barring common sense in particular situations. These should be the guiding principles for effective regulation:
Regulations should focus on goals, and not generally dictate how to meet them. Modern regulation dictates in agonizing detail precisely how to meet public goals. Thousand-page rulebooks are beyond human comprehension and, studies show, accomplish little at great cost. Some areas require detailed standards, such as pollution limits, but most goals involving safety or quality can be achieved far better if people have room to rely on their judgment and instincts, and then are accountable for how they do.
Regulation must honor human responsibility, not replace it. Human accomplishment requires a process of trial and error, and judgments on the spot about tradeoffs. Striving for perfect compliance with detailed rules is utopian, and leads to failure and frustration. People are not computers. Trying to keep straight countless details causes them to lose access to their intuitive intelligence. Instead of the joy of rolling up their sleeves to make things work, they are exhausted by trying to comply with countless non-intuitive criteria. Bureaucracy is evil not only because it is grotesquely inefficient, but because it makes people lose the dignity of ownership of daily choices.
Regulations must sunset, not keep piling up. Regulatory programs are treated as immortal, not fallible public decisions which need to be adapted to new circumstances and unintended consequences. For example, neither Congress nor agencies have reviewed dozens of job training programs to see if they work together sensibly or, indeed, work at all.
No one ever dreamed up thousand-page rulebooks, or infrastructure permitting processes that could take upwards of a decade. The red tape just grew, and grew more, as bureaucrats tried to clarify every new ambiguity with a new rule. Now it’s a jungle.
The solution is not to “de-regulate” most areas—citizens still want clean air and water. Nor is the cure to stride into the jungle with pruning shears, as recent presidents have done. It is impossible to tweak the current framework because it’s built on a flawed premise: To replace human responsibility at implementation with specific dictates. The system fails for the same reason that central planning fails—it doesn’t honor the circumstances of time and place.
The solution is to replace dense rulebooks with simpler, goal-oriented frameworks, and to safeguard against mistakes and abuses with clear lines of accountability. For important decisions, a second level of approvals can provide checks and balances.
The only practical way to reboot regulation is to appoint recodification commissions in each area, which will be charged with proposing new frameworks. Then the legislature can amend or adopt the proposals. The goal is to make government work for its citizens, not against them.