Alexis Garcia has this excellent piece at PJTV about the regulatory plight of a small business in Chicago.
After watching it, I believe the problem is much larger and more fundamental than silly rules about where a coffee shop owner puts chairs.
It is no surprise that a city like Chicago, taken over long ago by a variety of leftist camps — and embodying the progressive ideals of the left — might tell a coffee shop owner where to put his chairs.
Ideas have consequences. The explosion of regulations is a consequence of the leftist and statist bent of American institutions, not just bad decisions by regulators.
The problem isn’t the regulations. The problem is the leftist philosophy that spawned them.
But alas, in many places, the victims love the abuse. The left has not only marched through the institutions, it has marched straight into the heads of the majority of people who live in places like Chicago, Montgomery County (Maryland), San Francisco, and hundreds of other places. Citizens there like regulations. Perversely, many want more regulation, and more taxes.
These days, it seems if you want freedom to run your business, you need to plop down on a little-travelled county road in South Carolina or Virginia.
Over-regulation is also a political question. The people being victimized could band together to oust the politicians over regulating them. But in places like Chicago, that won’t happen. The political outcomes that give rise to over-regulation reflect the statist philosophy that is pervasive throughout the institutions. It isn’t just the code enforcement department. It is the schools, those dependent on entitlements, the government and academia.
The advocates of big government rule the field, the air, the sea. Only small pockets of resistance remain.
Why?
Over economic regulation is a symptom of a deeper malaise – a long leftward march through all institutions. When the opponents of regulations seem quirky or quaint, you know the advocates of statist control rule the field. The long march through the institutions has provided an environment where swarms of outlandish laws and regulations are commonplace.
The laws exist because the victors in the philosophical and political battles get to write them. Unraveling these commonplace regulations may be a task so mighty as to now be beyond the reach of conservative countermeasures.
Sure, small victories can be won here and there.
But undoing excessive regulation won’t be achieved by ad hoc attacks on a few dozen examples when millions of others remain on the books.
The task is far bigger. The task requires a shift in the prevailing philosophical winds. The task requires repeated political victories by opponents of the leftists who have bestowed the regulatory state upon us. Whether America still has enough fight is the question.
(Cross-posted at Rule of Law.)
” These days, it seems if you want freedom to run your business, you need to plop down on a little-travelled county road in South Carolina or Virginia.”
Well, I agree with virtually every word, Christian. But, you might want to tell the NLRB about South Carolina and let Boeing know as well.
It’s not the regulations, it’s the strangulations.
Capitalism and small c communism don’t mix. It’s an either/or proposition.
The radical extreme left does not like business. It despises big business, but it doesn’t have much more use for small business. It simply hates the free market.
Every instinct they have is to stifle, snag, snare, snap and snuff out business and replace it with the government’s iron fist. (except when it is handing out favors, bribes, graft and corruption to “favored” groups and industries)
Strangulation by red tape or by union thuggery, corruption and graft has the same net effect.
The union death march is a slow death. Strangulation by red tape can come swiftly or slowly, depending upon one’s ability to “lawyer up”.
The small c communists are not anti-business…they are anti-American free enterprise. They won’t protect a certain class of voter at the polling booth and they won’t protect a certain class of business on Main Street.
This is not coincidence. And we should start reasoning through it until we come to the full realization that this by full intent.
Quite simply, they’re opposed to you being able to survive without their control.
Marx ranted against small farmers for just that reason.
Back in the 1950s, when so many thought they’d reached the pinnacle in economics, Sumner Slichter coined “government-guided enterprise”. Problem is, they didn’t stop at regulating the few bad actors, the government when empowered moved on to government-strangled enterprise. A small respite under Reagan and the deregulators but they come back to the notion that they can run things better. The creep of regulation, the constant laments for there ought to be a law, the government should do something. Now we have the government’s hand firmly around the throat of freedom, liberty and enterprise.
Here’s a quote from 1886, the problem is we no longer repeal legislation. For some reason, the politicians consider legislation once enacted sacrosanct and beyond their reconsideration. One might think there is a conspiracy between the so-called rival parties against the public:
Everyone is, I think, missing several points about this that are salient.
1. The average person has no clue what the consequences are, when one of these regulations is put into place. The endless paperwork that’s involved kills jobs and absorbs productivity that would make people more prosperous, but the average person doesn’t see the paperwork being done, and doesn’t have to deal with the government inspectors. If they *do* know something about it, they assume that the business owner is wealthy, and can afford to pay someone else to do this work, it’s just that he’s too cheap. Of course the standard be-jealous-of-those-more-successful trope comes in as part of this.
2. Big business loves regulations. Everyone will try and tell you that this isn’t so, but trust me, it is. Starbucks, for instance, competes with the coffee place in this little documentary. They no doubt get caught in the various regulatory traps that ensnare our entrepreneurs above, but the difference is: Starbucks is big enough they have a legal department, a community relations department, etc. If those people can’t deal with this, a few phone calls to the local pol to whom they contributed thousands in the last election cycle should do the trick. Often, big business contributes to *both* sides in a partisan election, so that they’ve bought access regardless of who wins. Big business loves regulations, because they strangle small business, thereby letting big business thrive.
3. There’s a danger in single party politics in the United States. As far as I’m concerned, *every* corrupt state or city in the country is essentially a one-party place, where the incumbent is “safe” because the voters are largely from his party. As long as he can maintain his grip on the party’s nomination for reelection, he doesn’t have to actually be honest or anything; he just keeps getting reelected. Hence Marion Berry’s tenure as Mayor of Washington (I know it’s over now, but he was there for a long while after he got arrested), hence Charles Wrangel, hence the Daleys in Chicago, hence a number of other politicians over the years. Huey Long in Louisiana, and so forth. His son Russell famously told Jay Leno (when Leno was performing in night clubs with the Senator in attendance, flanked by pretty girls) that his political career was safe unless he was found alone with “a dead hooker or a live boy”. It’s this sort of thing that leads to a municipality where there’s excessive regulations: if you know someone, and/or can slip a bribe under the table, they leave you alone. If not, you get screwed.
I agree with those premises but I think it goes deeper. The political corruption is the armor that protects the political philosophy.
Communism or the American euphemism for it – “progressivism”, is the ultimate goal and has been ever since Marx and Engels. The progressives have been playing a tireless game of chess for decades. The first move was to control the national dialog through propaganda, so they worked their way into the movie industry, then television and of course, news media. The next big move was to indoctrinate children into left-wing ideology by infiltrating schools and universities. The other area they have selected to control is the judiciary process through the courts. By using the bully power of the labor unions, election fraud and frivolous lawsuits, they have very slowly but systematically taken control of the monopoly board.
The only way to fight back is to use the same tactic of incrementalism that they have used so successfully. We can’t “overthrow” liberalism or change the culture overnight through elections alone, as we have found out in the past. Even a sweep of Congress and the White House leaves Hollywood, the MSM, the education establishment, activist judges, and thousands of local bureacrats and unelected officials to advance their cause.
We have to eat the elephant one bite at a time. Having more conservatives running for local office, getting into the teaching profession and going to PTA meetings would be a good start.
The most exasperating argument in favor of oppressive regulation is some variation of this straw man: “You conservatives are against regulations! For the sake of profits you would have us eat tainted meat, and have our children play with poisoned toys!”
Strict regulation of the placement of chairs in a sidewalk cafe is the only thing keeping a greedy entrepreneur from putting chairs in the right of way and having his customers run over by buses while sipping their lattes.