79-02-B8

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Regulations

Transcript I've used this commentary many times to call attention to the ever-increasing burden of government regulations covering every facet of our lives. And here I go again: Alexander Hamilton said, "It will be of little avail to the people that laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow." Hamilton was speaking of laws written by our elected representatives. He had no way of foreseeing that multitudinous regulations having the power of law would be written by permanent employees of government who were not elected by the people. Today, more and more Americans are discovering that, by obeying the mandate of one agency, they violate the rules of another. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency wants hoods installed over coke ovens in the steel plants to reduce pollution. The Occupational Safety & Health Administration wants them removed because they increase the noxious gases breathed by coke oven workers. The steel industry is blanketed by 5,600 regulations enforced by 26 separate agencies. Officials of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology obtained approval from the Smithsonian Institute, National Park Service and the National Endowment for the Arts, ·to stage a laser-light show on the mall in Washington, D.C. The Bureau of Radiological Health let the show open and then closed it for failing to comply with federal safety standards. OSHA requires vehicles at some construction sites to have alarm bells which sound as warnings to workers when the vehicles back up. OSHA also requires those workers to wear ear plugs as protection against excessive noise, which it turns out includes those warning bells. OSHA is involved in another conflict -- this time with H.E.W. It seems H.E.W. claims jurisdiction over a hospital because federal money was involved in its construction. When an H.E.W. inspector found the hospital putting plastic bags in wastebaskets, it ordered them removed, charging that a careless tossing of a cigarette butt into a wastebasket could start a blaze and that the fumes of the burning plastic would be injurious to the patients. The hospital has a problem. OSHA ordered the bags be placed in the baskets to protect employees from contamination when emptying the wastebaskets. A study published in the Yale Law Journal describes this bureaucratic chaos as "a patchwork of specialized and fiercely independent agencies with different perspective whose concerns necessarily overlap and whose actions may contradict one another". The report might have added they create problems instead of solving them because the problems are their only reason for existing. We are up to our necks in alligators, and it's time to drain the swamp. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 79-02-B8 Production Date 01/19/1979 Book/Page RPtV-416 Audio Youtube? No
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