Milton Friedman on Regulations and Consumers

A brief lecture by Milton Friedman.
The 1960s Corvair, condemned by Ralph Nader as unsafe at any speed.
Since Nader's attack, it is being increasingly accepted that we need government protection in the marketplace. Today there are agencies all over Washington where bureaucrats decide what's good for us. Agencies to control the prices we pay, the quality of goods we can buy, the choice of products available. It's already costing us more than $5 billion a year.
Since the attack on the Corvair, government has been spending more and more money in the name of protecting the consumer.
This is hardly what the 3rd President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, had in mind when he defined a wise and frugal government as “one which restrains men from injuring each other and leaves them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” Ever since the Corvair affair, the U.S. government has increasingly been muscling in between buyer and seller in the marketplaces of America.
By Thomas Jefferson's standards, what we have today is not a wise and frugal government but a spendthrift and snooping government.
The federal regulations that govern our lives are available in many places. One set is in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In 1936, the federal government established the Federal Register, to record all of the regulations, hearings and other matters connected with the agencies in Washington. Volume 1, Number 1 in 1936, took three volumes to record all these matters. In 1937, it took four, and then it grew and grew and grew. At first rather slowly and gradually, but even so, year by year it took a bigger and bigger pile to hold all the regulations and hearings for that year.
Then around 1970, came a veritable explosion- so that one pile is no longer enough to hold the regulations for that year. It takes two and then three piles. Until on one day in 1977, September 28, the Federal Register had no fewer than 1,754 pages, and these aren't exactly what you would call small pages, either.

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The views expressed in the article are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by the members of the Foundation.

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