Previously on TheAngryPen:

09-12-2000 2 Parties

08-18-2000 Al’s Acceptance

08-10-2000 Gore’s Choice

08-03-2000 The American Dream

07-20-2000 History and Hollywood

07-13-2000 40 Acres and a Mule

07-06-2000 The God We Trust

06-29-2000 Lyrical Assault

06-15-2000 Bank Fees

06-07-2000 A Mixture Often of Incongruous Elements

05-24-2000 Social Security

05-17-2000 Governmental Good Intentions

05-10-2000 Johnny Reb and Disgusting Fatbodies

05-03-2000 Low Fidelity

04-26-2000 Jackboots and Black Helicopters

04-19-2000 Movie Trailers

04-12-2000 All Things Cuban

04-05-2000 Censorship

03-29-2000 Juries and Tobacco

03-22-2000 Several Things

03-15-2000 Gore the Reformer

03-08-2000 Mission to Mars

03-08-2000 Super Tuesday

03-03-2000 Little Johnny Murderer

03-01-2000 Bob Jones

02-23-2000 The Christian Coalition

02-16-2000 Valentine's Day

02-09-2000 Short-Sighted Political Parties

02-02-2000 Mosh Pits

01-12-2000 Al Gore's Personality

11-17-1999 Playboy

09-02-1999 The Demise of Heavy Metal

	TheAngryPen vs. Governmental Good Intentions

Just read a Washington Post article on the bitter Congressional duel over Governmental regulation of toilet size, written by Guy Gugliotta which reminded me of something. My mom (Momma Pen, you may call her) opened a Montessori School a couple years ago and the number of ridiculous regulations she had to obey along the way were so incredibly restrictive to the process of starting a new business, that what has been a boon to the educational opportunities of children in Northern Virginia (which should be the bloody point), almost didn’t get off the ground. More specifically, the school was very nearly buried in legislative costs and red tape, all of which started life as well-intentioned regulations designed to influence societal behavior in ways the Government decided would be beneficial for the country as a whole.

The point being that, because the Government gets to avoid the stigma of passing a tax, they are obviously going to be more amenable to the idea of passing an easier-to-swallow regulation. See, if they know they’re going to have to get up in front of the press corps and announce a new tax, they are much more likely, believe you me, to seriously debate the issue, than they are in the case of a simple regulation that can be used to achieve the same purpose without having to say the dreaded “T-word.” Often, poorly-thought-out law is the result.

In Mom’s case, the toilets were just the tip of the regulatory iceberg. There were regs to encourage environmental consciousness (Earth-friendly toilets, sinks, air-conditioning systems, etc.). There were regs to encourage occupational and educational safety (particular kinds of door locks, non-slip surfaces on steps and in bathrooms, specifics on jungle gym design, appropriate use of the word "school" in the corporate name of this "educational entity"). You name it, there's a Government regulation to enforce it, all of which guaranteed that my mom would face an obscene level of start-up expenditure, which she was then forced to pass along to her clients, all so that the Government could achieve some vaguely-defined goal of societal “better-ness” without having to worry about their various re-election chances when price indexes go up across-the-board.

But the worst part about all of this nonsense, was that these regulations that my mom faced were of the kind that sound great on paper and are very, very hard to argue against without coming off looking like a child-eating ogre--after all, who could be against door locks and non-slip surfaces? But, many of the rules were redundant and required an unnecessarily harsh attention to detail that, in the real, practical world where we all live--and Congresspersons do not--were silly. That's because these regs are generally nothing more than "feel good" laws enacted to kiss the collective ass of some particularly loud and annoying special interest group. Can you imagine, as a Congressperson, refusing to pass a seemingly innocuous regulation requiring sticky bathroom floors, while standing in front of a PAC spokesperson who also happens to be a doe-eyed mom who lost her kid to the scourge of slippery restroom surfaces? Not me, Chester!

But what we all need to remember, Congresspersons most of all, is that all this symbolic, and mostly needless, Governmental busy-work has real costs and real consequences, intended or not.

Let’s take a look at Gugliotta’s toilet example in more depth… just for shits and grins. Smaller toilet tanks sound great in theory; couple fewer gallons of water go down the drain with every flush. Water is conserved. Earth stays green. Huzzah! But here’s the rub: in my mom’s experience, every single time she would send a kid to one of her bathrooms who, shall we say, hadn’t been paying real close attention to his or her dietary fiber intake, the less powerful flush of the smaller tank would provide the gift of--you guessed it--the mother of all back-ups! Each back-up would require repeated plungings and, often, multiple flushings in order to (ahem!) relieve it. The end result being that, what would have required only one, slightly larger flush in the old days, now requires three or four of the smaller kind. So, in the long run, the cause of water conservation may wind up worse off for the existence of this well-intentioned regulation.

The lesson: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In this case, some yahoo probably did some study somewhere along the way where he thought he’d proved that conserving a gallon or two on each flush would save the oceans by next Thursday or whatever, and the Government went ahead and signed it into law without ever considering the cascade of events that would be this law’s inevitable consequence.

Bastards!

Or, in the less-inflammatory words (wuss!) of Ben Lieberman of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, who was quoted in Gugliotta’s article, "The low-flush toilet controversy . . . could be a signal for Washington's future direction. A federal government that believes it has the right, the need, and . . . the competence to set design standards for toilets, is a government losing sight of its limits and its limitations."

Indeed.

So The Pen is right there with those brave Congresspersons who are fighting to remove, or at least slow enactment of, some of these restrictive and unnecessary regulations. Because remember folks, once a law is signed, it never, eeeever goes away… so we need to be extra careful to make sure that we want all the laws we get. This is just one of those universal truths about Government, and we’re going to have to face it someday or risk eventual suffocation under the crushing weight of Governmental good intentions.