As we devise legislation of this kind, my observation through the years has been that we tend to work at the Federal end of the chain. We will put the money in the Federal end, and it’s almost always on the assumption that the party at the very other end gets his full cost. If there ever was a circumstance under which you wanted the various parties and participants to share, this is the circumstance. I would again come back to fostering and leaving opportunities open for encouraging initiatives on the part of the insurance underwriters, providers, and communities to share in the cost of this problem. Don’t make it so easy. Don’t just give 100 percent Federal money. Somebody has got to start giving on the chain.
[T]he expansion of government’s role in the marketplace has, in many cases, impaired the performance of our economy…That the trend toward accelerating inflation has been aggravated by the expansion of government expenditure programs…and by regulatory policies that reduce productivity.
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. We’re dealing with an enormously technical matter that the public doesn’t understand at all, that I don’t understand at all.
Each grain handling facility is unique, and the state of the art is constantly changing. Further, historically very little scientific research has been done on some of the fundamental questions involved in grain dust explosions.
OSHA at best has been a major disappointment, at worst an abysmal failure…To date there has been no solid evidence that OSHA has yielded any gains in safety or health.
It is sickening to see the gutless minions of the news media siding with those few crybaby Americans who obviously are looking for a handout from the very hand that fed and clothed their families.
The coal industry accepts its responsibilities for the safe operation of its mines and where regulation achieves greater safety, we have no quarrel. But, where it does not enhance safety, we believe that Federal regulation is misplaced and counterproductive. Rigid, inflexible, thoughtless regulation, no matter how well intended, can have a plainly detrimental effect on achieving a safe, efficient, and productive coal industry. It’s the overregulation and enforcement of the Act as an end in itself that has caused the coal industry most of its problems…
The question of the minimum wage goes beyond the immediate problem. It strikes at a basic underpinning of our democratic system. It touches on the ability of individuals to enter freely into contract without coercion and without arbitrary restrictions for mutual profit. Have we so soon forgotten that the American Revolution was fought in part because of such restrictions? Have we forgotten that there is a correlation between a free market economy and the amount of personal freedom enjoyed by the inhabitants of a country? I certainly hope not. What we are accomplishing by setting a minimum wage is restricting the ability of persons to freely contract for their services and, in so doing, effectively limiting their opportunities to achieve economic well-being.
I would hope we would never get into a position that we’d have to tell our customers they can’t buy certain cars because of the mileage requirements.
If we sell too many big cars in any quarter in 1978, we’ll have to hold back our product mix and we’ll have to ration or allocate cars. The law is final now, but if enough people complain when they can’t get a big car, maybe the government will revise its legislation. To meet 27.5 m.p.g. by ’85, the average weight of cars will have to be about 3,200 pounds versus 4,000 pounds now. That means every car would be a compact, subcompact, or smaller. The new law implies that we must get better fuel economy between 1980 and 1985 then between 1978 and 1980. That’s unlikely.
