Killing the SEC and Other Plans to Redraft Regulatory Agencies

Compliance Week covers CEI’s reccomendations for reorganization to the SEC and other agencies from Shrinking Government Bureaucracy.

Occasionally daydream about razing Washington’s regulatory agencies and starting from scratch?

The folks over at the Competitive Enterprise Institute apparently have. The public policy organization, “dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty,” has released a series of one-page briefs that argue “for major, overdue reforms to the federal government’s sprawling regulatory bureaucracy” and suggest ways various federal agencies could be restructured.

“Organizational change is hard. But it is not impossible. It requires adjusting the expectations and behaviors of an entire ecosystem of people—from employees to customers to vendors,” CEI’s introduction to the position papers says. “Perhaps the hardest change of all is in government organizations. With respect to regulatory agencies, we have reached the point at which nearly any effort to streamline is an improvement.”

“Fixing” the Securities and Exchange Commission is less preferable to CEI that outright eliminating it.

Originally, under the 1933 Securities Act, securities transactions were regulated by the Federal Trade Commission and applicable state agencies, the same as other business transactions.

However, the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act created the SEC, “which meant investors and entrepreneurs had to comply with a host of prescriptive mandates before offering shares of their businesses to investors,” the CEI paper explains, adding that “it is long past time to peel away the regulatory onion.”

Read the full article at Compliance Week.