B. U. G. S.

If you work at the receiving end of lobbyists, there is one thing you quickly notice. Lobbyists for small business organizations fight against government regulation. The National Association of Manufacturers which represent huge companies is perfectly comfortable with it.

The very, very rich tend to give to liberal causes. The moderately wealthy tend to be conservative.

Here I will concentrate on the first point above. Big business likes regulation because it drives its potential competitors out of business. When new regulations come into effect, they just forward them to their legal department.

For small business regulation is a nightmare. How do you know exactly how many blacks, hispanics, lesbians and left-handed people you have to hire and how many of the whites, straights and right-handed people who have worked for you for years in your staff of eight people do you have to fire?

Small business people tend to say, “Just give me a QUOTA. I’m already working day and night cleaning carpets I don’t have TIME to figure this out.”

But the government official, who has lots of time, points out that they do not have QUOTAS, they have GOALS. If you are not making adequate progress towards teh GOAL, and paperwork to prove it, they will come down on you HARD.

If it ends up in court this is a financial disaster for a small business, win or lose.

Meanwhile in the big business the legal department deals with all that routinely.

I have been through a LOT of rule-making procedures. I conducted them.

You have heard the expression, “A giraffe is a horse built by a committee.”

If you want to understand how Federal and state regulations are made, try to imagine a horse built by a committee from pieces of the suggestions put forth by two hundred OTHER committees.

There are other little difficulties.

Only Federal regulations contain the word “abolishment.” No Federal regulation contains the word “abolition.”

I leave it to you to figure out why.

The civil aviation code of Alaska contains the following, stand-alone sentence:

“There shall be no interstate flight within the state of Alaska.”

It would take me a week to explain that one.

All this is funny if you are not a small business that will have to spend tens of thousands of dollars in court when a bureaucrat feels you didn’t get the regulation right.

Corporate lawyers thrive on that sort of stuff.

Small businessmen just go out of business.