How Many Hours a Day are Wasted on Tyrannous Regulation? Six±

Do you go wondering where all your time and money gets wasted? It is no mystery.

It goes to "a zillion crankings of the government vise," "tooth-level surveillance," the EPA directive requiring milk to be treated the same as petroleum for the purposes of storage and transportation .... And there are as many there are dollars in our debt count!

"When you replace “law” with “regulation,” equality before it is one of the first casualties. In such a world, there is no law, only a hierarchy of privilege more suited to a sultan’s court than a self-governing republic."

Tyrannous Regulation - National Review Online

Mark Steyn May 28, 2011

Equality before the law disappears in rule by regulation.

Cass Sunstein is head of something called the “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.” I’ve seen enough conspiracy thrillers to know that when someone has so obvious a blandly amorphous federal-job description as that, it means he’s running some deeply sinister wet-work operation of illegal targeted assassinations in unfriendly nations that the government spooks want to keep off the books and far from prying eyes.

Oh, no, wait. Actually, Covert Operative Sunstein passes his day doing more or less what the sign on the door says: He collects information about regulatory affairs. More specifically, he is charged by the president with “an unprecedented government-wide review of regulations” in order to “improve or remove those that are out-of-date, unnecessary, excessively burdensome or in conflict with other rules.”

How many has he got “removed” so far? Well, last week he took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to crow that dairy farmers will henceforth be exempted from the burdens of a 1970s EPA-era directive classifying milk as an “oil” and subjecting it, as Professor Sunstein typed with a straight face, “to costly rules designed to prevent oil spills”. But Ol’ MacDonald and his crack team of Red Adair–trained milkmaids can henceforth relax because now, writes Professor Sunstein, Washington is “giving new meaning to the phrase, ‘Don’t cry over spilled milk.’”...

Read on - http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/268331