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The Tyranny of the Regulations Equation
Anyone who has ever built a rocket — or played at it on a computer — has encountered “The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation.” First identified in the 19th century, one of its consequences is that, at a given point, the costs of carrying more fuel outpace the benefits. Pushed past that point, the rocket either becomes inefficient in its early stages (and consequentially doesn’t take-off) or simply becomes so large that it collapses under its own weight. If a more down-to-earth illustration of the same principle suits you, consider the problems of hiking while carrying all your own food: eventually, the added benefit an extra granola bar provides is outweighed (literally) by the energy it would take to haul it up a mountain … that, or it simply rips your backpack open.*
As a piece in today’s WSJ illustrates, the same conundrum applies to regulations meant to give us a better welfare state:
U.S. regulators are pushing stricter rules for stores that accept food stamps, ultimately determining which retailers win and lose the billions of taxpayer dollars at stake. The proposal is throwing gas stations and corner stores into a battle with giants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Kroger Co. over the $74 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
By year end, the U.S. Department of Agriculture wants to adopt rules that require stores redeeming food stamps to stock a wider variety of meats and vegetables and sell fewer hot meals, like pizza. At a time when sales growth is hard to come by, redeeming food stamps is critical for grocers. Last year, SNAP funds comprised an average of 5.8% of sales at participating stores, according to a poll of 6,500 stores by the Food Marketing Institute, a trade group.
It makes a great deal of sense, doesn’t it? If we are paying for people’s sustenance, then it follows that we have an obligation to see that they have a nutritious diet. It’s even more true when the consequences of bad nutrition are remedied through publicly-financed healthcare. And, lest I be beating-up on the poor, the same applies to middle class entitlements as well: Hey, if I’m on the hook for your Medicare — a program that will go bankrupt decades before I retire — then maybe Mike Bloomberg has a point regarding sugary drinks and trans fats.**
Multiply this across a thousand bureaucracies, each striving — under ideal conditions and with the best of civil servants — to promote the public interest within its sphere of responsibility. Before long, you arrive at our current situation, where we’re suffering under a tremendous weight of regulation, much of which serves no other purpose but to ensure the proper implementation of other regulations.
It’s called tyranny for a reason. There is an alternative.
* In both cases, the problem is solved by refueling along the way. Sadly, there are no diners or gas stations in space. Yet.
** Alternatively, maybe it’s in my interest to let you eat and drink yourself into an early grave. This stuff is awful, isn’t it?
Published in Domestic Policy, Healthcare
I don’t know if it is intentional or not in your piece, but you reveal the true nature of this program(s).
SNAP is described as nutrition assistance for the poor. When in reality itis earnings assistance to low margin food retailers. SNAP equips people not generally inclined to comparison and nutrition shopping with disposable income that is often spent on high margin, processed food, of dubious nutritional value.
One of the scandals during the great SNAP reform debacle (in 2013 I believe) was Wal Mart threatening to re-state their earnings and revise future estimates down on the basis that SNAP funding would grow at a slower pace. Unfortunately that part of the story passed without media recognition.
Good article by the way.
Our family gas station / C-store already has coolers and a steam table, so we could probably meet the new standards without installing new equipment. But it would mean removing other items, ergo, we can’t sell what we know people want to buy, we have to sell what the regulations say the people should want.
And what should they want? From the article:
Goats milk. Fargin’ GOATS MILK.
I wasn’t aware the Goat’s milk and Tofu lobbies had such sway with the USDA.
One thing always leads to another. I would vote for giving the money without strings attached, and when the money runs out for the month, too bad. I like the idea of eliminating welfare and just sending out money. If the idea of welfare workers is to eliminate welfare clients, it’s not working. I myself think we will always have poor, and that charity is best done privately.
My favorite example of regulation inefficiency — although I would not bet huge sums on its veracity — is of a hospital (I think I lived in the KC area at the time) that had to put plastic liners in all trash receptacles ahead of Health Inspections and had to remove them ahead of Fire Inspections.
My teenagers all wanted to make their own decisions. And they wanted Dad to pay the bills. But Dad wasn’t willing to give up control UNTIL they attained financial independence. Yeah, it’s a process, but you get the idea. So why does any Adult think there is welfare without stings? Not only is that not possible, it would be dereliction on the part of the ‘Dads’. There is no free lunch it always comes with strings attached.
Government wants you to suffer and grovel in gratitude for the experience.
Good article. This is just one of the reasons the welfare state is far more harmful to its supposed beneficiaries than it is helpful. It has few, if any, redeeming social benefits, but it’s purpose was control, so who said it was supposed to help people. If nutrition were the objective it would be simple, provide free “inferior goods” like beans in every super market. Nobody goes hungry nobody binges. There would be export leakage in border towns. Big deal bean growers would be happy. Or just stop the nonsense entirely.
Not sure if WhiteWave sells goat milk, but it’s the vanguard of the healthy eating conglomerates.
A friend of mine owned a daycare and had to do something similar regarding a gate leading out of the play yard. The Fire Inspector required the gate to be easily operable by escaping children in the event of a fire. The Safety Inspector required that the gate not be operable by children so they couldn’t run out into the street. She explained the situation to both, and neither would budge. So she came up with a workaround: She purchased a gate with a latch that looked like it couldn’t be operated by children, but she taught all the kids how to open it. Then depending on which inspector came, she would have a trusted kid either demonstrate that he couldn’t open it, or that he could.
Well, the answer to this is quite simple. The government has already shown that it can operate a chain of Veteran’s Hospitals all across the country to provide top-level medical care with amazing efficiency and at a reasonable cost. It should be no problem at all to establish a nationwide chain of restaurants where
proleseligible citizens (with government-issued photo id) can show up 3 times a day to dine on the finest tofu products and wash them down with delicious goats’ milk. And think of the construction jobs that will be created to design and build these restaurants! And the jobs that will be created to staff them (although to keep down costs, they should be cafeteria style withoutwaiters and waitresseswaitpersons)! And think of the jobs created for goat herders and tofu farmers! And the jobs created for inspectors to inspect the restaurants – and additional regulators to draft new regulations for the operation of the restaurants! And if food supply costs nevertheless escalate too rapidly, then Soylent Green to hold down costs! Onward to Utopia!This is why Progressives structured healthcare reform in a top-down government controlled way, rather than seeking to eliminate the government actions that have distorted the market (tax subsidies, certificates of need etc) that would have let a solution develop in a more spontaneous way.
Once the government controls the flow of dollars, as it now does substantially in healthcare via Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare, it uses that as a justification for interfering with people’s day to day decisions on the basis that it impacts how the government is spending its money. Market based solutions fail to provide that justification.
I think I prefer WFB’s proposal from around 1970 or so. He was on a panel that was tasked to make recommendations regarding the future of food stamps (this was back when there were, you know, stamps) and the “Guaranteed Annual Income” to prevent what was then known via that particular generation of leftists as the problem of “Hunger In America”. The best reply to the latter statement came from Richard J. Daley (The First), the notorious mayor of Chicago, who advised that if anyone in Chicago was truly hungry, they should just call his office. and they would get him a sandwich.
The panel hit upon the solution for the moral hazard, by recommending that four things be given away “free” in certain stores, and people could just come, sign a paper, and haul the stuff away. The four items were determined to provide all the nutritional needs of a survival diet: brown rice, bulgar wheat, powdered milk, and dried beans ( along with a booklet of recipes). This diet solved all the hunger problems, and at the same was not an invitation to scam the system.
I fully expect that in my lifetimes we will see limitations on my food choices – no burgers or fried foods. Limitations on hobbies, why you could sever a finger on that band saw. Motorcycle? no way man….too many expensive injuries to cover and on and on….
So this stuff will go bad cause no one buys it and it’s the government that made them stock it. So the government has to pay them for the out of date stuff. And take it away. New army of Dept of Ag employees to do and supervise and pay.
But is the goat’s milk organic?
More importantly, how has it escaped being made into cheese?
Why not just give live goats to poor people so they can milk them themselves? It at least would provide some humorous stories.
That’s pretty much what is happening with SNAP funds now anyway. Fraud is rampant in the program and is accomplished when users go to crooked merchants who give them 50 cents cash for $1 worth of benefits. Neither state or federal government has any desire to stop it because the feds provide the funding and the states administer it. I found this out years ago when I was selling a software program that could detect the fraud. Nobody cared.
Mere tyranny would be an improvement. What we’ve got is totalitarian government.
All kidding aside, the implications of Tom’s fine post are that our great benevolent and so caring government will limit our choices with the excuse since they control the money, they absolutely must make the decisions, thereby reducing commerce, reducing jobs and in the end reducing our standard of living by some small measure by just this one action.
Rinse and repeat a few hundred thousand times and Voila! we will become Venezuela!
This tyranny of regulations has already laid significantly large portions of our economy to waste during the last eight years and it is a sad, sad thing our Presidential Candidates – the both of them -aren’t interested at all. In fact they don’t want to even hear about it.
That’s why all those folks shouting about a government granted right to healthcare back in 2009 were so deluded. With government healthcare all you have is a right to the amount, type and quality of healthcare that the government deems appropriate for you and is willing to pay for.
I think you are missing the point about government limiting choices.
The problem isn’t gov’t limiting welfare recipient’s choices. The problem is a central government powerful enough to confiscate our property/earnings to distribute to others in the form of SNAP and other welfare.
Oy veh. Add to this madness the possibility of Elizabeth Warren in our future – helping St Hill, that is…
Here’s an idea: Take all the “nutritious” food that Michelle Obama is forcing schools to serve, and which the kids just throw away, and let the stores “stock” that. You could just rotate the trash cans from the schools to the convenience stores. Since nobody is going to buy this stuff, you wouldn’t even have to take it out of the trash cans. Just keep it “in stock” until the next trash can shows up, and then throw it away.
Yeah, that’s exactly the idea, actually.