Don’t miss PERC senior fellow Bruce Yandle’s article in the latest issue of Regulation magazine.
With 40 years of accumulated executive order wisdom to draw on and knowledge tapped from turning out some 2.5 million pages of Federal Register rules since 1970, President Obama looked the Leviathan in the eye and called for a review that will “root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.”
In a world where everything can be regulated, requiring agencies to act on better benefit-cost analysis is a wonderfully important idea and requiring retrospective reviews of mossy rules is to be celebrated. But as good as they are, those ideas and others in EO 13563 do not take account of our regulation driven capitalism and the incentives playing throughout it.
In short, “EO 13563 gives commands to an army of regulators who operate as if they are external to the economy they seek to fix, while in fact they are a part of it.” Read more here.