It’s not just businesses and individuals that are stymied by excessive regulations. John O’Leary provides some stories from Detroit and his own experience to show how government rules lead to worse government services:


I serve on the school committee in my town, and we wanted to put a modular classroom, a prefabricated building that is also called a temporary or portable classroom, on the back of a crowded elementary school. We expected it to cost about $600,000. But a new state regulation dictated that if we put on a modular, we’d have to install a new sprinkler system in the 50-year-old building at a cost of an additional $900,000.

Needless to say, we didn’t put on the modular classroom.

This fire safety rule may have been well-intentioned, but in application it produced a foolish result. Students now have to endure overcrowding, and the building still doesn’t have a sprinkler system.

He also points to this helpful piece by Phillip K. Howard.

Just reinforcing that government budgets next year cannot just try to do less of the same but rethink what government does and how it does it.