75-08-A4
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Regulations / New Wave # 1
TranscriptA new kind of federal regulation is increasing prices to the consumer and destroying small business. I'll be right back. Murray Wiedenbaum is a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, now Director of the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University of Saint Louis. In a recent speech in our nation's capital Dr. Wiedenbaum had bad news for all Americans: a new wave of American regulation threatens to raise prices indiscriminately and drive small businesses into the ground. This new wave of regulation includes such agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. All of these agencies were set up to accomplish laudable goals. Who among us would object to protecting the environment, preventing discrimination or improving safety conditions for our workers? Indeed who among us is not in support of such goals? Unfortunately however these agencies are so devoted to these particular goals they pay little heed to what they do to the efficiency of business or to keeping prices low. The forest of a healthy economy, high employment and low prices, is lost for the tree of, say, worker safety. Now of course we want safe working conditions, but an agency like O.S.H.A., Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is thus all too likely to pursue its mandate to the ultimate. You can make a worker completely safe by taking away his job and the safest factory or mill is one that's closed down. I'm really not exaggerating. There are now 5,146 different types of approved government forms. Last year businesses and individuals spent a hundred thirty million man hours filling them out, and this adds some fifty billion dollars to the cost of doing business, which means to the prices we pay. Consider instead a small businessman who must provide an O.S.H.A. approved exit in his office or plant. What is an exit? The dictionary says it is, quote, "A passage or way out." Unquote. Now you have to admit those five words describe it for anyone who understands English. But the language of bureaucracy is not that precise. Here is the way the O.S.H.A. manual defines an exit. Quote, "That portion of a means of egress which is separated from all other spaces of the building or structure by construction or equipment as required in this subpart to provide a protected way of travel to the exit discharge." Unquote. Now that's 39 words but O.S.H.A. says to grasp that definition you have to know the definition of a means of egress and so their glossary supplies the answer. Quote, "A continuous and unobstructed way of exit travel from any point in a building or structure to a public way and consists of three separate and distinct parts: the way of exit, access the exit, and the way of exit discharge. A means of egress comprises the vertical and horizontal ways of travel and should include intervening room, spaces, doorways, hallways, corridors, passageways, balconies, ramps, stairs, enclosures, exits, escalators, horizontal exits, courts and yards." Unquote. And after all that the small businessman realizes that he still doesn't know what an exit is because as Dr, wiedenbaum points out O.S.H.A. has been unable to supply a definition of exit that doesn't contain the word exit. Webster uses five words, O.S.H.A. uses 39 and then another 74 trying to tell you what the 39 said. I'll be back tomorrow with more on the new wave of regulation. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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