Our founding fathers envisioned a government by the people. In fact, in his Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln concluded with the words, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In the last few years, we’ve forgotten Lincoln’s words. We now have government by regulation, and it is paralyzing our nation.
The growing mountain of costly, overlapping and often conflicting government regulations at the federal, state and local levels has stymied growth as investors sit on the sidelines waiting for more certainty.
At the federal level, government is expanding its reach into people’s personal lives. The pervasive attitude in Washington, D. C. is government knows what’s best for businesses and families, so pay up, shut up and follow our lead.
For example, under Obama-care, rather than take necessary health care reforms step-by-step and do a cost/benefit analysis to see what works and what doesn’t, President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, strong-armed or bought off dissident members of their own party, ignored the will of the American people and rammed through a mammoth piece of legislation that virtually no one had read. They simply left it up to bureaucrats and staff to fill in the blanks.
In stepped the Internal Revenue Service.
In four years, you and I will have to report our health care coverage to the IRS, and employers soon will have to fill out an IRS 1099 form for every transaction over $600. Buy a pickup for your landscaping business? Send a 1099 to the car company. Purchase more than $600 in office supplies and equipment? Send a 1099 to Office Depot. Pay more than $600 a year for shipping? Send a 1099 to UPS.
This regulatory rampage doesn’t stop with Obamacare.
When President Obama couldn’t garner enough support to pass his costly and controversial cap-and-trade legislation to control greenhouse gases, his Environmental Protection Agency imposed cap-and-trade regulations, essentially circumventing Congress.
We no longer have a government of laws; we have a government of regulations.
This is bankrupting America and sapping the strength and initiative of entrepreneurs. Our economy is not growing because no one wants to risk their money when regulators keep changing the rules.
Old-fashioned way
Ironically, all this is unnecessary because the free market innovates and improves to meet consumer demands.
For example, the government didn’t have to tell Tom and Christophe Allen, owners of ACME Fuel in Olympia, to sell biodiesel at their card lock stations. They saw it as an opportunity to satisfy customer demand.
Procter & Gamble Co. started making concentrated laundry detergent because people are concerned about garbage and excessive packaging. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., one of its largest customers, now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergents that require less water in manufacturing, less packaging, less fuel to ship and less storage space.
Worldwide, Wal-Mart says that reducing just five percent of its packaging by 2013 will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 667,000 tons — equivalent to taking 213,000 trucks off the road each year and preventing the burning of 324,000 tons of coal and 66.7 million gallons of diesel.
That’s solving a problem the old-fashioned way, through the law of supply and demand, not a 2×4 across the head from a bureaucrat.
So, the overriding question in these elections is, do we want to continue top-down centralized government or are we going to allow Americans to come together to solve problems for themselves at the local level?
Put another way: After more than 200 years, have we decided to abandon “government by the people?”
Don Brunell is president of the Association of Washington Business, Washington state’s chamber of commerce. Visit http://www.awb.org.
