Ed Brayton on the Hidden Tax Argument

And I think he pretty much demolishes it as an argument. It is, of course, quite valid to calculate the cost of some policy and then ask whether the result is worth the price, but the simple statement that their is a cost accomplishes nothing.

One further note I would add. Just because jobs are lost in one industry doesn’t mean those jobs are necessarily lost to the economy. Ecological regulations, for example, increase the cost of producing certain things, and the increased cost will reduce demand, and thus jobs will be lost from that industry. But that extra cost goes into another industry where it will be creating jobs, always providing, of course, that something valid is accomplished by the regulation.

What this sort of thing should cause us to do, I think, is carefully analyze all policies and all regulations to see if the benefits are worth the cost. I’m guessing that there are quite a number of regulations that seem on the surface to accomplish something useful. We like to label laws with wonderful statements of the benefits they are supposed to confer, but it is much rarer for us to test those results, and even rarer still to change the policy just because it doesn’t work.