The costs of the regulatory state

One of those ideas about why it was Britain that had that first industrial revolution is that it was, at that time, one of the few places where you could just go do stuff. We’re sure there’s more to it than that but we’d also insist that being able to just go do stuff is an important part of being able to develop new things. As it is now:

Mr Kynge said the Government needed to reduce the regulatory burden and speed up bureaucratic processes to help British companies compete.

We would, being the cheeky little extremists that we are, suggest eliminating most to many bureaucratic processes. Only where we do agree that any should exist at all would we suggest mere reduction and speeding:

The Chatham House report found that in the pharmaceutical sector, China could rip through the clinical development of new drugs at three times the pace of Europe, for half the cost.

Think of the number of people who die because new drugs are late.

We have, a number of times, insisted that China is one of the most free market economies on the planet. Yes, obviously, there’s all that national planning and state ownership of industry and so on. Commanding heights and the Communist Party and all that. And yet at the ground level entry into a market is near entirely free of restriction. In that free to enter the market sense of free market it probably is that most free market economy too. In the professional life of one of us we’ve seen a Chinese company go from idea to production in the time it takes to do the environmental paperwork in Europe. We’re even willing to agree that total freedom to do just anything might not be optimal. But more absence of regulation and where that’s non-optimal less and faster seems like a good idea to us.

One of the grand values of free market competition being that it is that others have different rules that shows us how much our own rules and restrictions are costing us.

“Chinese competitors are going global and rising to the forefront of global technology. That means that a UK business anywhere in the world is going to experience blowback from these uber-competitors coming out of China,” he said.

That’s the cost of having Lanyards deciding everything.

Tim Worstall