When people complain about “compliance costs,” they’re usually lamenting hundreds of billions of dollars spent unproductively by businesses forced to deal with ever more red tape. It hinders growth and undermines prosperity.
Every hour spent on compliance is an hour stolen from creativity and productivity. Banks have
spent $50 billion more on compliance
in each of the 12 years since the Dodd-Frank Act became law in 2010. Small businesses
lose 3.3 billion hours and $64.6 billion
annually meeting demands made by Obamacare.
This is vast financial damage and lost opportunity. Yet America’s compliance culture is surely even more corrosive to our general thriving — to can-do optimism, self-reliance, willingness to take risks, self-worth, even happiness.
These qualities, now pushed relentlessly into retreat by the expanding frontiers of public and private sector conformity, were central to America’s fabulous historical success. And as they wither, we become a less impressive and capable country, a less outgoing and confident people.
Examples are everywhere.
Some are so trivial as to be absurd and thus inflict damage by humiliation, obliging sensible, high-functioning grown-ups to jump through hoops uselessly. Empty performance displaces substance. We’ve all gotten used to the tedious, performative security of taking our shoes off at airports, even though other countries don’t require it. Another air travel regulation limits passengers to two carry-on bags. The result is that airport staff tell us to cram surplus bags into the permitted two. It doesn’t reduce the mass of luggage by an ounce but checks a useless box. The compliance cost is reduced self-respect as autonomous adults obey pointless diktats.
Some corrosive compliance is much more tangible, such as the requirement to write “diversity statements” for admission to law school or to get a university job. Applicants must say not simply what race and gender they are, which is bad enough — I was recently asked both questions merely applying to refinance a mortgage — but also what steps they’ve taken to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Under the guise of tolerance, these statements stamp out true diversity and fairness and impose an inflexible, radical, left-wing standard, the compliance cost of which is intellectual freedom.
A 2020
survey
by the Cato Institute found that 62% of Americans, nearly two out of every three people, fear speaking freely in case others dislike their views. Anxiety is unevenly distributed: 58% of staunch left-wingers feel they can say what they want, but 52% of less adamant liberals self-censor, as do 64% of “moderates” and 77% of conservatives. The more your opinions are out of line with left-wing dogma, the more you fear attack and cancellation. The compliance cost of self-censorship is freedom of speech.
The proliferation of useless rules, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, has fostered uncertainty, making people unnecessarily cautious in circumstances where once they’d have happily relied on instinct and basic good sense. It’s common to see people enter a restaurant, store, or other public facility wearing masks and then, seeing that others are unmasked, sheepishly take their own off and comment, “Oh, I didn’t know what the rule was.” They’re not worried about masking as a matter of health. They’re worried about not fitting in, about doing what everyone else does, and about being unmasked as a flouter of government commands. The compliance cost is lost competence and initiative.
Lost also is consent, the vital link in flourishing democracies between the laws by which we live and the engaged agreement of citizens. Increasingly, we must live not according to guidelines we can see are sensible and important but under coercive restrictions we recognize as bossy and pointless. It is not healthy. The compliance cost of unwanted, unreasonable, and peremptory restrictions is democracy itself.
Fortunately, government excess and arrogance have (one hopes finally) enraged the public enough to make ordinary people rebel. They have suffered enough, and they are poised to punish the party that torments them.
States run by Democrats are scrambling to abandon their mask mandates. They pretend that this is because the science has changed, but it has not. Only the opinion polls and proximity to November’s elections have. These blue governments are merely getting a year late to the point at which Republican-run states arrived a year ago. What is happening is that those who turned the crisis of the pandemic into an excuse to heap a backbreaking load of new impositions on the public realize that they have pushed voters too far.
They find it doesn’t work anymore to denounce the recalcitrant as racists, fascists, and MAGA peddlers of misinformation. The sell-by date on those grotesque insults passed last year. Finally, the cost of compliance has become greater than America is willing to bear. Like so many other empires that overextended and then collapsed, the culture of compliance appears to be cracking and falling apart.
