Is Politics Insoluble?

The Torrent ofLaws I 47
going through stacks of the Code of Federal Regulations,
found that the Code ran to 19,789 pages in 1938, to 20,643 in
1958, to 73,149 in 1976, and calculated it would top 120,000
pages by the end of 1978.
Adding the Costs
How can we add up the countless costs, penalties, discour-
agements, delays, hazards, impediments, obstructions, that
these orders place in the way of production and commerce?
Even if we give up the futile attempt to add up the gov-
ernment regulations numerically, we can still point to some of
the costs and hardships that they impose on the taxpayer, the
motorist, the businessman, the homeowner, the consumer, the
worker, the investor, and the nation as a whole. In the July
Tax Review of 1978, published by the Tax Foundation of New
York, Murray L. Weidenbaum, a former Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury, has detailed some of these costs:
• The outlays of 41 regulatory agencies are estimated to
have increased from $2.2 billion in the fiscal year 1974
to $4.8 billion in fiscal 1979, a growth of 115 percent over
the five-year period.
• Federally mandated safety and environmental features
increased the price of the average passenger automobile
by $666 in 1978.
• There are over 4,400 different federal forms that the pri-
vate sector must fill out each year. That takes 143 mil-
lion man hours. The Federal Paperwork Commission
recently estimated that the total cost of federal paper-
work imposed on private industry ranges from $25 bil-
lion to $32 billion a year, and that "a substantial portion
of this cost is unnecessary."
• Regulatory requirements imposed by federal, state, and