Regulations and business

I saw some comments on the board recently about the strangulation of business through regulation.  It's a subject I've always been fascinated by because of its vast complexity, politicization and above all a complete lack of named regulations.  It's so rare that any politician right or left ever names an individual regulation they don't like.  They are always referred to in bulk: "Those darn regulations are killing American jobs."  Certainly some are pointless and expensive, but I never like referring to things in bulk.  It would be like saying "taxes are bad."  All taxes? 

Certain government bureaucracy needs trimming.  I've never met anyone on either side of the aisle say there was nothing they wouldn't change in the bureaucratic system.  The famous Paper Reduction Act that increased paper usage by 30%.  California has a new law that if you accidentally see medical records, even if you didn't want to, you get fined what to most people would be devastating amounts. 

On the flip side though, I feel that regulation isn't truly "strangling" business.  To go further, the lack of regulation caused the recession in the same way it caused the Great Depression.  Banks were allowed to leverage themselves far beyond their means.  They were allowed to be multifacet investment firms due to repeal of regulations keeping banking and certain forms of investment separate.  For instance, you could become a bank, a mortgage derivitives bundler, a financial insurance company and an investment broker, even though these separations were meant as a form of financial checks and balances to prevent widespread corruption. 

Despite ideas to the contrary that corporations don't want to hurt you, they are ethically neutral.  Child labor laws, abolition of slavery, worker safety regulations and environmental protections exist only because of the government.  Equal pay for minorities and women, while not working as they should, have gone so far because of the government. 

So, it is a tad bit frightening when people talk about how we have to cut regulations to compete with countries like China.  I believe we can compete with China technologically and culturally, but never in manufacturing.  Never in a million years.  First, they have almost four times our population, so numbers wise that's tough, but it's far deeper than that.  Cutting regulations and lowering taxes so companies come back home?  China has no regulations.  They got cadmium on their toys and toothpaste and sold it to you.  They commit vast amounts of copyright infringement.  Their working conditions are so terrible that they have to put nets around their buildings to catch suicidal workers who aren't allowed to leave their corporate dorms.  There's equal pay for everyone in that everyone gets paid practically nothing.  They can dump any chemical byproduct they want directly into the rivers that they drink from. They can force their workers to relocate wherever they choose en mass. 

There will always be countries with no regulations, no laws and little to no taxes.  If you fight fire with fire, everything burns.  What I feel we need is less useless regulations that burden small businesses (I remain unconvinced there are that many of these) and more that severely curtail offshoring of industry and money, separate all forms of investment back out into their appropriate categories and provide consumer protection to create an even playing field.  Or we can start putting up suicide nets and become a culture of slavery like China.