Bureaucratic overreach
Cry Wolf Quotes
‘Consumer interest’ is an amorphous concept, made up of many competing elements, and the CPA [Consumer Protection Agency], time and again, will be called upon to make paternalistic judgments as to what is best for 200 million American consumers.
Government regulatory activities frequently result in much overlapping and duplication of effort, contradictory requirements, and an increasing drag on productive economic activities.
Why, then, would [the Boston City Council] threaten to drive away businesses by signing on to a murky, unpredictable, and divisive ordinance that requires employers and their subcontractors to open their books, including wages, deductions, and fringe benefits, to all "applicable" city departments? The Internal Revenue Service and the state Department of Revenue are required to keep such information confidential. The city ordinance requires it to be made public, placing businesses at a competitive disadvantage.
Exercising such authority, of course, would require an enormous federal policing force, perhaps in the thousands. Already, employers, in their long-standing voluntary programs to make their plants safer, scratch hard for qualified safety experts. Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz blandly explained to Congressmen that getting people would be no drawback. He said he could staff his safety policing team with the hard-core unemployed. These presumably would then show up as federal ‘inspectors’ armed with power of life or death over your business.
