The Pandemic Is a Reminder That Many Regulations Are Both Costly and Unnecessary

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Reason

If there is one thing the coronavirus pandemic has shown, it's that regulation gets in the way. 

Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative non-profit that advocates for lower taxes, has compiled a running—and growing—list of federal and state rules and regulations relaxed or suspended during the crisis. As of this writing, the list is up to 561 regulations. Unsurprisingly, many of the rollbacks are specifically related to the provision of health care services, one of the most heavily regulated sectors of the economy. But the regulatory rollbacks span the gamut, from legalizing cocktails to-go and relaxing rules governing distillery production of hand sanitizer to small business lending reforms to allowing "remote marriage" in a number of states. 

Each of these rules formerly made it more difficult to conduct one's business or personal affairs, and each made it more difficult to respond, or merely live, in a pandemic. It's both sad and telling that it took a unique global health crisis for policymakers to decide that they were not worth the costs they imposed.  

One reason why is that the costs of regulation are not always obvious. The nature of rulemaking is to impose hidden costs, especially when, at the federal level, the writing of regulations is largely delegated to executive branch agencies not subject to the same budgetary processes and pressures that govern Congress. 

Instead, to calculate the cost of these sorts of rules, we must turn to independent estimates like The Ten Thousand Commandments, an annual survey of the cost of the federal regulatory state produced by Clyde Wayne Crews, the vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank. 

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Crisis micromanagement.