by John Stossel
On my FBN show, we cover entrepreneurs, like the ones who created Intel, Genentech, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft. They created vast wealth and, of course, cool things. Is it coincidence that all that creation happened in San Francisco and Seattle, the two metropolitan areas farthest from Washington DC? I doubt it. Sadly, those company now spend millions on lobbying—millions that would be better spent on inventing.
We’d be better off if we just had fewer rules.
To my surprise, this week one of America’s most economically clueless newsmagazines, Newsweek (maybe Tina brown is making it better), features some sensible arguments along those lines. A sample:
Decades of accumulated laws, often obsolete, have created a government paralysis of its own making.
… Bureaucracy crushes teachers; doctors order tens of billions in unnecessary tests to protect themselves from lawsuits; businesses forgo new opportunities because of bureaucratic hurdles…
In an ideal world, we’d scrap the byzantine legal framework we’ve inherited and rebuild simpler systems that permit flexibility to meet today’s needs…Start Over… A general sunset law—every law with budgetary implications would automatically expire every 10 years unless reenacted—would impose some automatic review.