The Federal Reserve's objectives - its dual mandate, set by Congress - are to promote a high level of employment and low, stable inflation. Unfortunately, the job market remains quite weak; the national unemployment rate is nearly 10 percent, a large number of people can find only part-time work, and a substantial fraction of the unemployed have been out of work six months or longer.What if interest rates are a second- or third-order cause of unemployment? What if taxes, finances and spending weren't the sole foundation of the economy? What if there was something else at work? Something like ... The Federal Register.
The Federal Register (browsable back to 1998 at that link) is the list of all Federal regulations. Over at regulations.gov, you can browse them by topic area. Here's a good example of one.
On August 8, 2007, the Department of Agriculture released a 52 page set of regulations telling all farmers how to do mandatory livestock reporting. Here is a one-paragraph-out-of-52-pages excerpt:
Section 59.202 discusses the daily reporting requirements for barrows and gilts including what information would be reported, when it would be reported, and when it would be published. For barrows and gilts, packers required to report under this rule would report the details of their barrows and gilts purchases three times each day including a prior day report not later than 7 a.m. central time, a morning report not later than 10 a.m. central time, and an afternoon report not later than 2 p.m. central time, including all covered transactions made up to within one half hour of each specified reporting time. Packers completing transactions during the one half hour prior to the previous reporting time would report those transactions at the next prescribed reporting time. This information would be published by the Secretary each reporting day not later than 8 a.m. central time, 11 a.m. central time, and 3 p.m. central time, respectively. For barrows and gilts, packers required to report under this rule would also have to report not later than 9 a.m. central time on each reporting day information regarding all barrow and gilts slaughtered during the prior business day.That's one paragraph from Part 59 of the Federal regulations on agriculture. Each state then adds its own regulations.
Creating jobs will require starting new businesses. People who start their own companies are extraordinary people. Most already have jobs or can find ones working for someone else. If starting a business means obeying a rapidly growing mountain of regulations like the one above why would you bother? When choosing between obeying all of these rules and regulations, which you can't hope to understand or even remember, or picking up a paycheck working for someone else, will slightly lower interest rates make much of a difference?
What do we get when we print money to fight a problem that isn't amenable to more money?
3 comments:
Yes, the level of government regulation has always bugged me. I keep remembering something that used to be said about the Soviet Union when I was a kid. The basic idea was that there were so many laws, regulations, and guidelines in the USSR, many of them contradictory, that it was physically impossible to do anything without violating some law or another. And this was considered a feature by the government, because then anytime they wanted to they could arrest anybody on some charge or another, without fail. Or, they could use the threat of arrest to make anybody do pretty much anything they wanted.
We were supposed to be better than that in the US, but I'm not so sure. Even the *lawyers* seem to have gotten to the point where they don't know the law outside of their particular narrow specialty.
Tim, building codes in San Diego are pretty close to that point. When you want to build a house or add to one, the regulations are so Byzantine that their real-life interpretation depends completely on who you get at the permits desk and as your inspector.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a natural consequence of the endless accretion of regulations.
For those like me who didn't know what they're talking about... "A barrow is a young castrated male hog; a gilt is a young female hog. Both are raised for pork."
So the regulation requires us to call Washington three times a day when buying pigs. I'm sure this is essential to the nation somehow.
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