Vin Suprynowicz

There are Alien Abduction and crop circle Web sites. There are Web sites that argue the Holocaust and the moon missions were faked. And now, at www.propublica.org/blog/item/whats-the-evidence-that-regulations-kill-jobs, you can read about how regulation doesn’t cost jobs, since all jobs lost in the regulated industries are replaced by new and better jobs in the regulatory agencies riding herd over them.

“The effects on jobs are negligible,” from government regulations, explains Richard Morgenstern, who served in the EPA from the Reagan to Clinton years and is now at Resources for the Future, described here as “a nonpartisan think tank.”

“They’re not job-creating or job-destroying on average,” he explains.

Almost a decade ago, we’re informed, Mr. Morgenstern and some colleagues published research on the effects of regulation using 10 years’ worth of Census data on four different polluting industries. They found that when new environmental regulation was applied, “higher production costs pushed up prices, resulting in lost sales for businesses and some lost jobs, but the job losses were also offset by new jobs created in pollution abatement.”

Wow! So if we keep regulating and regulating, till any given industry has seen its work force and profitability reduced by 90 percent, it won’t matter, because we’ll now have 90 regulators to regulate each 10 remaining workers, leaving the “jobs” picture the same!

Just like if you go into a wildlife sanctuary which used to house eight wolves and 1,600 rabbits for the wolves to feed on, and kill off 1,592 of those rabbits and replace them with 1,592 additional wolves, everything will still be fine, pretty much indefinitely, since your “animal count” remains the same!

I know a fair number of people who’ve been supporting themselves with small, start-up businesses, probably “under the table” while still collecting unemployment checks (I don’t ask), since being laid off over the past two to four years here at Ground Zero of the Great Recession. (What will it take to make it Great Depression Two? Dollars in wheelbarrows?)

Good for them. That’s the American spirit.

Some sell records and CDs and DVDs Online. (Sellers may now outnumber buyers for some of these products. You have to know what you’re doing. Many who try this without sufficient product and market knowledge will fail.) Some do repair and maintenance work on their friends’ cars. The lists of possibilities is endless.

Eventually, in a normal economy not crippled by taxes, regulations, and uncertainty about what kind of punish-the-rich crap Washington or the state capital or the county seat is going to dream up next — in the pre-1965 or even better the pre-1933 American economy, to cite the great, world-class example — many such start-up entrepreneurs would now be reaching a point where they say, “Honey, this business has just plain outgrown this house. We’ve got more orders than we can deal with, and I want my living room back. I think it’s time we rented some kind of commercial or industrial building, hung up a sign, put in a ‘business’ phone, and hired a couple people to help us catch up on all these back orders.”

Today, anyone who’s been to the zoo to see the elephant will say those words only in a voice dripping with irony. These people now croak like the beatnik Maynard B. Krebs if you suggest they might want to create “a job.” People I know, after “growing” their business sufficiently to pay the bills, are now actually reversing course and selectively DOWN-SIZING, doing anything possible to AVOID ever being caught with a “brick-and-mortar” location and — foulest of dirty words — a “payroll.”

Why? Talk to anyone who’s tried to set up a business in this town or any town this size in recent years. Tens of thousands in costs to install sprinklers up to the new fire code, a hundred grand to bring the old, perfectly adequate rest rooms up to new “ADA” compliance — unless you’re smart enough to just lock them and tell your customers they don’t exist. Thousands more to install either more lighting or less lighting. (Yes, “green” energy standards in the new codes can actually lead compliance officers to inform you your premises are TOO well-lit — better to let customers fumble in the dark.)

Going to use any solvents or lubricants? Ready for the solvent and lubricant disposal compliance officers to come calling? Planning to do some baking? Did you know the EPA now considers that delicious aroma of fresh-baking bread to be a toxic pollutant you may have to spend millions to capture and destroy?

Sidewalk table? There are special permit and six-figure steel-girder construction mandates in case a city bus rolls up on the sidewalk. Planning to hire a guitar player? More permits. Will any of your employees need to subject themselves to fingerprinting for a “sheriff’s card”? Wanna bet?

Set up to collect, withhold, and submit with the proper paperwork to half a dozen different authorities your sales taxes, property taxes, unemployment insurance premiums, payroll withholding taxes — some monthly, some quarterly, all due whether or not you had any income that month, all carrying penalties from massive fines up to and including jail time should you get the paperwork wrong?

We know a garage owner who was fined for a sales tax “error” — he didn’t charge tax on a $3 blinker bulb he installed for a regular customer for free.

Planning to serve food — even pizza slices from a machine — sell vitamins or medicines, or do anything having to do with firearms or any other type of merchandise that might attract thieves and “fences”? In that case, you haven’t even begun. Let me introduce you to the state health department, the county health department, the Metropolitan Police “pawn detail” and the federal Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which can interrupt your business to audit you for days at a time without notice, closing you down and costing you your entire investment for alleged errors on fewer than 1 percent of your ledger entries. No meaningful right to appeal.

Speaking of the ADA, if you hire someone who later claims to have a disability, can you ever fire them? What could happen to you if some of your employees decide they want to join a union, or some union just decides to picket you because you’re providing goods or services to some other non-union employer in town, or you let such a fellow invest in your fledgling operation? What kind of costs could ObamaCare and even union-supported state “benefits mandates” soon start to impose on your little enterprise? How high could new “green” mandates drive up your electric bill? Do you have all the proper permits for that sign you wanted to put up? Get this: In Las Vegas you can’t even APPLY for a sign permit. You have to hire one of a small number of licensed sign COMPANIES to even file the APPLICATION! And they charge THOUSANDS!

Regulation doesn’t cost jobs? How shall we count all the jobs that would have been created by all today’s start-up entrepreneurs, who survey this landscape and quietly slink back to “doing it themselves,” without ever having stuck their heads up far enough to get whacked?

This is why there are no jobs — not because “interest rates aren’t low enough for entrepreneurs to borrow.” In fact, if you want ME to consider investing in a start-up business, offer me two points above prime — with prime at 10 to 12 percent, where it was when the nation started to climb back out of the stagflation of the Carter years.

But I guess those of us who point these things out are “just doing the bidding of our pals, the greedy fat-cat oil companies.” I met a guy once, up Alberta way, who manufactures drilling rigs. Does he count?