Bureaucratic overreach Quotes

The additional costs required to administer equal pay legislation cannot equal the benefits proposed. Legislation such as this is destined to increase the size of our bureaucracy at a time when every effort should be made for stabilizing our economy.

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Statement of the American Retail Federation, at the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare (Subcommittee on Labor).
357908/01/1962 | Full Details | Law(s): Equal Pay Act

The retailing industry recognizes the need for responsible conscientious treatment of its workers. There is justifiable resentment against unnecessary further incursion of the Federal Government into business operations with the attendant danger of increased bureaucratic controls, increased interference with private business, and, most important, further regimentation of the individual.

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Statement of the American Retail Federation, at the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare (Subcommittee on Labor).
357808/01/1962 | Full Details | Law(s): Equal Pay Act

Our members are not so much concerned with the prospective legislative mandate to pay women on an equal basis with men as they are with (1) the need for a Federal statute and (2) the consequences of a blank check to be given to the Secretary of Labor to engage in ‘fishing expeditions,’ ultimately resulting in harassing retailers and, in some cases, punitive action.

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Statement of the American Retail Federation, at the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare (Subcommittee on Labor).
357708/01/1962 | Full Details | Law(s): Equal Pay Act

It is important to public health, therefore, that Government regulations should not hamstring the medical advances produced by the industry. Disease and death can result from unnecessary delay in permitting a lifesaving drug to reach the public…

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Eugene M. Beesley, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PMA). Testimony, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce hearings.

An unfettered exercise of power is certainly beneficial to no one, and governmental departments are no exception to this rule.

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Edward J. Breck, president of John H. Breck Inc. (a major cosmetics firm), Testimony, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce hearings.

If overcautious and restrictive Government regulation had blocked [penicillin] testing and introduction twenty years ago, some lives would have been saved while a multitude of lives would have been lost.

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Eugene M. Beesley, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PMA). Testimony, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce hearings.

A Government agency proposes to: Collect the tax. Control the money. Set the rules. Determine the services. Direct doctor and patient participation. Dominate every citizen’s medical affairs.

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AMA pamphlet (Your Medical Program…Compulsory-or Voluntary?) from the AMA’s public relations campaign against health care reform. 1949.
283901/01/1949 | Full Details | Law(s): Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill

I appear before your honorable committee not in opposition to any specific bill pending before you but to express our approval of the position taken by the National Coal Association in this and preceding sessions of Congress in opposing the expansion of Federal bureaucracy over the daily lives of our people, some of whom are not cognizant of the dangers involved and the threats implied to the curtailment of their right to pursue their vocations unmolested and free from the cold hand of Federal interference.

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Jesse V. Sullivan, Secretary, West Virginia Coal Association, Testimony, House Committee on Public Works.

[Social Security will ] impose a crushing burden on industry and labor [and] establish a bureaucracy in the field of insurance in competition with private business.

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Republican statement on the Ways and Means committee vote.

We are creating an enormous bureaucracy to take care of problem the magnitude and significance of which we really do not understand…. This is a problem so far-reaching, so important, and so long in duration that it should not be as an emergency measure, without the opportunity for review and consideration, so as to minimize the inevitable tinkering that will come.

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Elon H. Hooker, president of the Manufacturing Chemists Association. Senate Finance Committee hearings.

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