America is being suffocated by over-regulation. It’s costing U.S. industry trillions in compliance costs. While discussing this at our Saturday Morning Breakfast Club, I posed to our attorney friend the following question: “Why don’t we eliminate regulations and just use the rule of law instead?” He thought that was a good idea. After discussing the proposal for a few minutes, we decided it just might work. Let’s keep the laws we have and use the criminal and civil courts to enforce the law.
According to the National Association of Manufacturers, manufacturing employers in the United States pay on average $19,564 per employee each year to comply with regulations. Small U.S. manufacturers, those with 50 or fewer employees, are burdened with $34,671 in average compliance costs each year for each employee. This money is a total waste of the manufacturer’s capital.
If compliance costs could be eliminated, manufacturers could give each and every one of their employees a 25 percent raise. Even though giving employees a 25 percent raise is great, stopping America from another revolution is much more important.
“I smelt a rat,” declared Patrick Henry, a leading figure in the American Revolution, during the writing of the Constitution. His concern was that too much power was going to be given to the federal government, taking away the rights of the states — which meant taking away of the rights of the people.
The struggle between federalism and states’ rights has led to disastrous consequences for the American citizenry. How about a little incident that happened about 150 years ago where 620,000 Americans were killed and another 476,000 were maimed? Since then, our population is 10 times the size it was then. Would a revolution today mean 6 million friends, relatives and acquaintances would be killed? That incident was called the Civil War between the states.
My children’s children are being led around like a bull with a ring in its nose. Because of our struggling economy of the past 10 years, America’s youth has lost confidence in free enterprise and capitalism. Class warfare is now being effectively waged by modern socialists. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has again called for a “political revolution” in a series of meetings in the Boston area recently and during the Obama years. His audiences, the 18-29 age group, heard countless presidential speeches railing against the evils of “crony” capitalism.
A 2016 Harvard University survey of millennials found that 51 percent of the respondents do not support capitalism. After listening to Bernie, they want free child care, a free college education and a free roof over their head. The website www.thestate.com asked, “Do they think that the state will provide no matter what, so there’s no need to save, no need to work hard or pay your mortgage or student loans?” I think they do.
Now is not the time to point fingers; now is the time to mount an effective campaign to give the millennials a lesson in civics. And here is an idea on how to do it:
Small business must take the bull by the horns and accept this responsibility. It would only take pennies on the dollar for the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) to create an ongoing lesson plan with visuals on how capitalism and free enterprise, not socialism and welfare, have proven to be the key to prosperity and to reducing global poverty and inequality.
In 2015, the World Bank estimated less that 10 percent of the world’s population was living in extreme poverty, the majority of which are in countries that eschew capitalism. “Capitalism has demonstrated, through 70 years of global prosperity, that it can improve the lives and general wellness of millions of people,” thestate.com says.
Robert Pembroke is the former chairman and CEO of Pembroke’s Inc. in Salt Lake City.