Regulation by stealth

As a Libertarian, I often focus a lot of my attention on "big" government spending, regressive taxes and the like. However, I, like many others, pay very little attention to the overall effect of government regulation towards our fiscal performance and future prosperity. And as G. Bruce Doern explains in this article in the Ottawa Citizen, we definitely should be paying attention:

Carleton professor G. Bruce Doern, the Conference Board of Canada's newest scholar-in-residence, pointed out the folly of these problems in a meeting with the Citizen's editorial board. Setting regulations is as significant a function of government as taxing and spending, Mr. Doern says, but it almost always happens under the public radar. Everyone goes crazy for weeks over the federal budget, but 40 to 50 new federal regulations come into force each year with little attention.

Unless, of course, you're trying to be innovative in one of the industries affected by government regulations, in which case you're likely to find yourself spending years and millions of dollars trying to penetrate a thicket of rules, some of which might be redundant or contradictory, just to bring a product to market.

Mr. Doern proposes treating regulation with the same seriousness as we do taxing and spending, making an annual declaration of a regulatory agenda part of the normal parliamentary schedule.

(Hat tip Paul Tuns)