Vanquishing the red-tape monster

Using common sense to cure bureaucratic stupidities

On Fox News last Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump lamented that those seeking government permits sometimes “are waiting in line for 15 years,” sometimes only to get rejected in the end, and vowed to speed up the process. To succeed, he’ll need a new approach to governing.

Every president since Jimmy Carter has vowed to cut unnecessary regulations, but the redtape machine has defied all attempts at control.

Trump’s idea is to institute a “one-in, twoout” rule — that for every new regulation, two must be removed. Britain instituted a similar protocol in 2010 to cull unnecessary regulation and recently expanded it to “one in, three out.” This is part of a broader British effort to control regulatory creep, and it has achieved modest success. Imposing similar discipline on new U.S. regulations is long overdue. For the past 50 years, Washington’s approach has been like the Roach Motel — regulations check in, but they never check out. But incremental reform is not enough.

Red-tape reformers have failed because they assume the problem is a matter of degree — that there are just too many rules. Liberals stride into the red-tape jungle with pruning shears, and find themselves entangled in the internal logic of the rules. Conservatives get cheers for demanding deregulation, but when push comes to shove, voters don’t want to drink polluted water, eat spoiled food or entrust loved ones to the unsupervised care of strangers in day-care centers and nursing homes. That’s why the regulatory state grew, not shrank, in the 20 years of Reagan and two Bush presidencies.

What reformers have missed is that regulatory failure is not merely a matter of too much regulation but is caused by a flawed philosophy on how to regulate. Both sides assume that human responsibility should be replaced by what is called “clear law.” By striving to prescribe every possible good choice, and proscribe every possible evil, U.S. regulation became an obsessive exercise in micromanagement. That’s why rulebooks are often 1,000 pages, while the Constitution is 15. The evil to be exorcised by all these legal dictates is human authority. Only by lashing each other tightly with detailed law can liberal and conservative politicians be sure that the other side won’t do something bad.

But ordinary citizens in our free society are also lashed to these mindless dictates — complying with rules that often make no difference, filling out forms no one reads and stymied by bureaucrats whose response to every idiocy is always, “The rule made me do it.” In