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