Mafia Democracy by Michael Franzese

Author:Michael Franzese
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Published: 2022-04-12T15:00:59+00:00

Strangled in Red Tape

And it’s only getting worse. According to the Committee for Economic Development, the number of people employed at federal regulatory agencies has grown from fifty thousand in 1960 to nearly three hundred thousand today. Total spending for creating and enforcing federal regulations grew from nothing sixty years ago to more than $70 billion in 2016. Between 1970 and 2008, the number of prescriptive words like “shall” or “must” in the code of federal regulations grew from 403,000 to nearly 963,000. That’s about 15,000 new edicts a year—a rate that Obama accelerated during his two terms. Obama got rule-generating behemoth laws like the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd–Frank bill passed, but when Congress stopped cooperating with his regulation jamboree, Obama just kept issuing new ones through executive fiat.

Dodd–Frank is a great example of how complicated our government has become. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Congress passed the forty-page Glass–Steagall Act to place limitations on banks’ risky investments. In 2010, after the banks’ risky behavior with subprime loans brought us to the brink of a second Great Depression, Congress passed the 850-page Dodd–Frank bill to rein the banks back in.

Dodd–Frank is a monument to government overregulation. Even at almost a thousand pages, it was still mostly an outline for more regulations. One rule outlined in the law includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions. It calls for more than four hundred different rules, many of which haven’t even been written yet by federal regulatory agencies. It’s a law that just continues to spawn more and more regulations. Outspoken musician Terre Thaemlitz hit the nail on the head when he declared that “laws never protect anyone, despite claiming to be all about protecting the public. Each legal restriction only strengthens the power of Mafia and crime (organizations) who step in to help people do what the law says they can’t do, in every country.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not in favor of a lawless society, not by any means. Even when I was a mobster, I was not in favor of lawlessness. If you don’t have law and order, people like mobsters who are willing to break the rules would have no advantage over people who follow the rules.

This is one reason why politicians and lawmakers are so effective at lining their own pockets; they can break the rules that hold others back. In fact, politicians have a distinct advantage over mobsters because they have the power to write rules that exempt them from restrictions that hold everyone else in check. Former Mob boss Paul Castellano said it well. “This life of ours, this is a wonderful life,” Castellano said one time. “If you can get through life like this and get away with it, hey, that’s great. But it’s very, very unpredictable. There’s so many ways you can screw it up.” If you’re a politician, it’s much more predictable. You can cheat without risk.

But overregulation is having dramatic effects on our country. It’s slowing down economic growth and entrepreneurial innovation.

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