The left discovers a truth about regulation

By Jon Sanders, Carolina Journal, July 19,2013.

The General Assembly has generated plenty of publicity while debating a bill that would affect abortion clinics in North Carolina. Senate Bill 353: “Health and Safety Law Changes,” would (among other things) increase state oversight and regulation of abortion clinics by requiring the physical presence of a physician in the room when an abortion is performed and by having the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services write rules applying to abortion clinics that would be guided by the agency’s standards for ambulatory surgical centers.

The proposed regulations have produced an epiphany among the political left in North Carolina. Increasing state regulations harms the regulated industry by making it harder and more expensive to conduct its business.

In response, the left has discovered a nascent, this-issue-only libertarianism with respect to regulating abortion clinics.

The News & Observer reported that “Opponents say the bill could force abortion clinics in North Carolina to close because they won’t be able to afford costly upgrades.”

The newspaper’s editorial board put it this way: “It’s a bill masquerading as an effort to provide safer health care for women while its intent is to make the safety requirements so onerous that almost all abortion clinics would have to close or spend heavily to meet the standards similar to those for outpatient surgery centers.”

The News & Record quotes Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, who said the bill “does nothing to create jobs.”

Suzanne Buckley, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina, called the bill a “sneak attack” and said, “It’s just clear that they’re looking to restrict access to abortion, and they don’t care how they do it.”

One would almost find this welcome suspicion of government regulation from the usual cheerleaders of big government encouraging — but for the fact that the outrage is so highly centered around the single issue of abortion, which is of particular importance to the left. Abortion is no doubt the priority here, as opposed to vociferously pushing the state to adopt a more laissez-faire stance to regulation.

Otherwise, why have there been no protests about North Carolina regulators trying to force the closure of, or restrict access to, outpatient surgery centers?

Yes, regulation imposes significant economic costs. What can be done?

That government regulation imposes real costs on citizens and businesses, hindering commerce, stifling job creation, and perpetuating other ills has been long known. As I wrote in my chapter on “The Next Steps on Regulatory Reform” in the John Locke Foundation’s book First in Freedom:

[S]uch concerns are as old as the very founding of the nation to which the State of North Carolina belongs. Two of the charges laid against King George III in the Declaration of Independence were that “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance” and that “He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.”

JLF has long warned about the real, significant costs of overregulation. Our polls of state business leaders consistently found that the state’s regulatory burden ranked very high as a factor reducing the state’s competitiveness. We have highlighted many ways to free North Carolina from those burdens, including