How does government grow?

How does government grow?

All governments grow 'one regulation at a time'.  

Since governments operations today are so very large and ubiquitous, government growth imperceptible to the average citizen. Like a cancer, however,  that also increases one cell at a time, the final results can be devastating to the 'public body'.

With the creation of every law, bi-law, policy, regulation and/or  statute comes a legal obligation of the state to enforce it. This results in the hiring of more public sector workers including lawyers and their support organizations, court clerks, policy analysts, police officers and their support organizations, judges and their supporting resources, technical writers, IT support staffs, sign creators and installers, etc.

The forgoing identifies the financial costs. What about the costs to freedom. For example, as a citizen, do you spend a few hours each week to read up on all these rules and regulations to ensure that your actions confirm to their legal constraints on your freedom to act ? No? I didn't think so. BUT - be for-warned: "Ignorance of the law is no defence."

Our tax and government debt burdens have grown continually at rates that have exceeded our national wealth accumulation and rates of inflation ( which is created by government as another form of taxation) over my lifetime ( since 1951). Governments justify these increases due to increasing costs of ever-expanding public programs and services,  and their own rising administrative costs associated with meeting these responsibilities. We Taxpayers have also faced increased costs of living and we are all individually expected to 'live within our means, the state continues to claim that their needs are more pressing than ours and unapologetically demand ever more from us. At what point in our history did the needs of the state become a higher priority that the needs of the citizens that it is alleged to serve?

As a Libertarian, I seek smaller government. To achieve these, it stands to reason that you cannot reduce government size until you reduce the "responsibilities" that we, The Voting Public, assign to government. It seems to me, however, that we are more than willing to ask the government to take on New Responsibilities (ie add new regulations and programs) BUT we also never stop to reconcile whether its existing work assignment still provide any measurable value to us. For this reason, it is past overdue for The Public to implement a program of "Regulation Rollback" at all levels of government with the long terms vision of achieving a state of "Regulation Equilibrium". Allow me to explain….. 

Currently, there are some 500,000 regulations on the books in Ontario. I contend that many (most?) of these have out-lived their usefulness and currently consume more TaxPayers' Dollars than the value they provide. In business terms, a Public ROI could not be found that would justify their ongoing costs. Consequently, I propose Regulation Management & Retirement Board  (RMRB) that would possess the mandate to manage and trim all provincial regulations with the ultimate objective of reaching a state of "Regulation Equilibrium".   To achieve this, the RMRB would:

1. Prevent the passing of any new regulation unless 5 existing regulations could be identified and retired which no longer meet a pre-defined Public ROI yardstick. 
2. Ensure that all costs associated with passing new regulations, as well as researching/identifying the 5 to be retired, must be born by the party that seeks to new regulation. 

The expected outcome? - over time, the number of regulations will decrease along with the costs associated with enforcing them. 

 It can logically be expected that groups interested in creating new government regulations will find it increasingly difficult to identify existing regulations that the Taxpaying Public is willing to eliminate. "Regulation Equilibrium"will be  achieved when, theoretically, these special interest groups will be unable to identify 5 existing regulations that can be eliminated in exchange for the one new regulation they desire. At some point, it may become necessary to change the rules to allow the exchange  of 3 existing regulations for one new one, then 2 for 1 and ultimately 1:1.

One advantage of the RMRB is that it will become increasing difficult to pass new regulations,  or maintain existing regulations,  that only serve small interest groups, and not the broader interests of society. The small interest groups will seek new channels to satisfy their interest without incurring public costs.

Excessive Regulations serve as a dead weight hung about the shoulders of the creative, entrepreneurial and productive elements of society. Wealth creation is the primary goal of any nation's economy so that the standard of living for all citizens can continue to rise. If the regulatory burden continues to increase, then the wealth creation process is further hampered.

On the other hand, some level of regulatory control is necessary and beneficial. It is hoped that the "Regulation Equilibrium" that is reached and maintained finds the right balance for Canadian society.

Consider a theoretical continuum of regulatory burden in a province like Ontario - the extreme left of that continuum would start  with zero regulations and progress towards the extreme right to represent  an infinitely rising number of regulations.  A state with no regulations would manifest  as the purest form of laissez-faire market economy with the greatest level in individual freedoms − some may call this 'utopia'; others 'anarchy'. As the regulatory burden increased from zero the economy would pass through various stages of 'controlled anarchy' through states of various degrees of socialism and/or fascism, and ultimately communism controlled but dictatorship with little to no individual freedoms for the public masses. Somewhere along this continuum, an optimal level of regulations would be struck to find an acceptable balance of personal and market freedoms and controls for all.

 I believe that a properly implemented Regulation Management & Retirement Board  could go along way to finding and maintaining this balance,