Business and the Economy

The California regulatory system has been described as a perfect machine for killing California business. Combined with a prohibitive tax structure the regulator bureaucracy presents a strong incentive for business to go elsewhere, taking jobs and our economic future with them. Further, while regulations frequently burden us all, the beneficiaries of the regulatory activities are often relatively small special interest groups. In my view the regulatory burden has reached a critical mass that will destroy the job producing segment of our state if we do not get regulation under control.

Our most fundamental beliefs as a nation are being destroyed by the regulatory bureaucracy and the politicians that support it. We see ourselves as a people who live by the Rule of Law as opposed the rule of status and arbitrary government. The Rule of Law protects us by denying those in authority the power to give special legal privileges to anyone and allows us to know that there are limitations on the use of the coercive power of government. The Rule of Law is, in essence, the legal embodiment of freedom. The fact that the actions of the state are authorized by legislation does not mean that the Rule of Law is preserved. Even in a democracy, legislation may fail to obey the rules which limit the power of the state. It is in this way that a democracy can lead to the most evil despotism imaginable.

Regulations per se are not in conflict with liberal principles but regulations need to be debated by the legislature and thereby truly subjected to the political process. The delegation of legislative authority has been a hallmark of the degeneration of democracy into despotism and the delegation of legislative authority is a serious problem in the State of California. The legislature is constantly passing laws with titles like “The Workers, Mothers and Infants Protection Act”, following which they take bows before the cameras. But these laws do not lay out the regulations being imposed, none of the work has really been done and the difficult issues have often not been addressed. Rather, the law creates a new bureaucracy with nearly unlimited power to regulate a particular group of people.The bureaucrats making the decisions are not elected by anyone, and in practical reality are responsible to no one but themselves. By this route we have come to a state of regulatory suffocation.

My primary goal in the area of business and the economy is to reform the regulatory process. I propose that the delegation of legislative authority be prohibited and that the legislature be required to debate and vote on each subsection of each regulation. In this way regulation will be brought under the control of elected officials who will no longer be able to hide behind bureaucrats when disaster strikes. This will also discourage the free wheeling passage of special interest regulations by opening the process to greater debate.

Last modified on Tuesday, October 15, 1996