That’s the question posed in a series of thought-provoking pieces in The Economist.

The basic premise is this: “regulation may crush the life out of the American economy.” The rather provocatively titled articles include:

The Diagnosis

Here are some of the highlights:

  • Regulations cost $1.75 trillion a year.
  • Regulations add an average of $10,585 in costs per employee.
  • The Dodd-Frank Act is held up as an example of lawmaking gone awry. It’s 848 pages long, with virtually every other page requiring regulators to fill in additional details. Some of those “clarifications” are hundreds of pages long (including one featuring 383 questions with 1,420 sub-questions). One form required by the law is 192 pages and costs between $100,000-150,000 to fill out. And there’s more to come: of the 400 rules the law mandates, only 93 are finalized.
  • Rule-making has risen dramatically under the Obama Administration: rules passed with an economic impact of more than $100 million are up 38% versus the Bush Administration’s first three years (194 to 141).
  • Poorly written laws are at the heart of the regulatory woes. Said one member of Congress: “People vote on things they have not read, do not have the time to read and cannot read.”
  • There’s even a bit of humor, including a note about a Florida law that requires vending machine labels to urge the public to file a report … if the label is missing.

The Cure?

Here’s just one of the rather intriguing fixes offered by the authors:

America needs a smarter approach to regulation. First, all important rules should be subjected to cost-benefit analysis by an independent watchdog. The results should be made public before the rule is enacted. All big regulations should also come with sunset clauses, so that they expire after, say, ten years unless Congress explicitly reauthorizes them.

What Do YOU Think?

We recently asked more than 1,000 business professionals this question:

Notice that a whopping 0% of our respondents said “much easier.” 2% said “easier.” 79% said either harder or much harder. In other words, 39-and-a-half times more said that things are getting harder rather than easier.

We’ll be taking a little poll next week to follow up on some of those results. In the meantime, express yourselves below: What do YOU think?

For more, check out The Cost of Employment Laws,which includes a state-by-state ranking of employment law regulatory burdens.