Government Regulations: Costs and Dangers
A government regulation is a set of rules written by some executive branch agency to organize a certain economic activity. They start when the legislature passes a law to organize some economic activity and as part of that law, it creates a new executive agency or tasks existing agency to create the rules that people and businesses have to follow to comply with that law. The agency then maintains these rules, updates them as it sees fit and enforces them through either financial penalties or prosecution for violation.
Federal Government regulations are violating the Constitution because the Congress is delegating lawmaking to the executive branch. The Constitution has a clear separation of power between the three branches and it doesn’t give the power to any of the branches to delegate its powers to another branch. Not only does Congress delegates its power to write law regarding a certain area, but also it effectively loses that power. Once created, the regulatory agencies can write as many regulations as they want and Congress can only repeal a regulation by passing a bill, but given that the President still has the veto power the Congress can repeal a regulation only if it has a two-thirds majority support for that repeal. This effectively eliminates the power of Congress in every area regulated by an executive agency. According to the information on the federal register, which maintains all the federal rules, Congress had only disapproved one rule since 1996.
