This is the core reason why it is so difficult for ordinary people to pay their bills or raise families, despite earnings that would make them rich elsewhere or elsewhen. These productive actions are severely restricted, because if you are going to be productive then you have to do so ‘correctly’ and obey all sorts of rules and requirements.
There are plenty of good things that aren’t restricted and bad things that are. But elites are human and aren’t going to get it right every time, and you’ll notice most the cases where they got it wrong.
I don’t think elite behavior is at all well-characterized by assuming they’re trying to strike a sensible tradeoff here. For example, there are occasionally attempts to cut outdated regulations, and these never find any traction (e.g. the total number of pages of legislation only grows, but never shrinks). Which isn’t particularly surprising insofar as the power of legislatives is to pass new legislation, so removing old legislation doesn’t seem appealing at all.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but there are a couple of technical problems with it. For one thing, the total number of pages does sometimes decrease. (See the last plot in this document.) Total pages isn’t a perfect measure of regulatory burden, but many other measures have the problem of counting repeals as new regulations. (See the same source for a discussion about what counts as a “rule”.) Also, most regulations are drafted by executive agencies, not legislatures—especially at the federal level.
Re: “the total number of pages does sometimes decrease”, it’s not clear to me that that’s the case. These plots show “number of pages published annually”, after all. And even if that number is an imperfect proxy for the regulatory burden of that year, what we actually care about is in any case not the regulatory burden of a year, but the cumulative regulatory burden. That cannot possibly have stayed flat for 2000~2012, right? So that can’t be what the final plot in the pdf is saying.
I took another look at my source, and I think you’re right. The subject of the plot, the Federal Register (FR), lists changes to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). It also suffers from the other problem that I identified (repeals counting as new rules).
For anyone who’s curious, here’s a nice overview of measures of regulatory burden.
There are plenty of good things that aren’t restricted and bad things that are. But elites are human and aren’t going to get it right every time, and you’ll notice most the cases where they got it wrong.
I don’t think elite behavior is at all well-characterized by assuming they’re trying to strike a sensible tradeoff here. For example, there are occasionally attempts to cut outdated regulations, and these never find any traction (e.g. the total number of pages of legislation only grows, but never shrinks). Which isn’t particularly surprising insofar as the power of legislatives is to pass new legislation, so removing old legislation doesn’t seem appealing at all.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but there are a couple of technical problems with it. For one thing, the total number of pages does sometimes decrease. (See the last plot in this document.) Total pages isn’t a perfect measure of regulatory burden, but many other measures have the problem of counting repeals as new regulations. (See the same source for a discussion about what counts as a “rule”.) Also, most regulations are drafted by executive agencies, not legislatures—especially at the federal level.
I appreciate the link and the caveats!
Re: “the total number of pages does sometimes decrease”, it’s not clear to me that that’s the case. These plots show “number of pages published annually”, after all. And even if that number is an imperfect proxy for the regulatory burden of that year, what we actually care about is in any case not the regulatory burden of a year, but the cumulative regulatory burden. That cannot possibly have stayed flat for 2000~2012, right? So that can’t be what the final plot in the pdf is saying.
I took another look at my source, and I think you’re right. The subject of the plot, the Federal Register (FR), lists changes to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). It also suffers from the other problem that I identified (repeals counting as new rules).
For anyone who’s curious, here’s a nice overview of measures of regulatory burden.