Laws Against Laws: A 118th Congress Regulatory Reform Agenda For Rightsizing Washington

It’s all right

to be little-bitty.

— Alan Jackson, “Little Bitty,” Everything I Love, 1996

It ought to be harder to enact bad laws and regulations than to get rid of them.

Joe Biden’s “whole-of-government” (that’s his term) spending and regulatory campaigns encompassing “climate,” “equity,” “competition policy” and more are a worrisome new development in the United States. While understandably preoccupied with a banking crisis and that frightening $31 trillion debt, the 118th Congress must awaken and address surging federal intervention in manufacturing, finance, energy, technology, the environment, small business, family life, and state and local government affairs.

The surge in federal consolidation over the past three years has been extraordinary, yet is Congress’s doing as much as Biden’s. There were were alternatives to the Families First Coronovirus Act, the CARES Act, the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act. The choice to expand free enterprise rather than grow Washington by trillions of dollars on misbegotten and mis-named mega-legislation was always available, but always ignored.

The alternative approach to maximizing national well being and economic health is federal downsizing: An unprecedented campaign to remove barriers to entrepreneurship, business creation and hiring by shuttering bureaucracies and eliminating laws, rules, programs, federal jobs and contracts; and following all that up with vigilant and relentless regulatory liberalization, privatization and localization of whatever federal functions remain.

Read the full article on Forbes.