America today has become a country in decline, stupefied, paralyzed, and strangled with over-regulation of everything.

Long ago, 1930-1931, Americans built the Empire State Building, at the time the tallest building in the world in eighteen months. They put up the Golden Gate Bridge, then the longest and tallest suspension bridge and still the most beautiful, in four years, ahead of schedule and under budget.

It took thirteen years to replace the fallen World Trade Center.

My father bought a brand new Chevrolet for $1500 cash in 1960. Today, cars are loaded with so much safety crap, emissions nonsense, and electronic folderol, you can no longer work on them yourself and they cost a lot more than an ordinary house used to. A “cheap car” is priced in the low $40Ks.

Government controls everything and owns the whole natural world. Find an abandoned baby squirrel bring it home and save its life? Why! you have violated the law.

We’re like the Saxon peasants and our various levels of government do a fine job of playing our Norman overlords: Bad King Fed, your home state the local lord the wicked Sir Guy of Gisbourne, and your locality government the nefarious Sheriff of Nottingham. Rescue a baby squirrel and you’ve broken the king’s forest laws. We just have no Robin Hood.

Just about the whole (oppressed, Saxon portion of the) country is seething in indignation over the death of Peanut the Pet Squirrel at the hands of the bureaucracy of the State of New York.

John Carter did a great job of covering the whole Peanut story.

All this “We own the World” stuff from American government is simply an inevitable product of the Progressive Movement’s drive to empower via Government the credentialed managerial/professional class of “experts” to institutionalize, rationalize, regulate, and control absolutely everything.

In the old days, Americans, including Ben Franklin, quite commonly kept squirrels as pets.

John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Doesn’t reading this San Diego Union-Tribune story make you happy you don’t live in San Diego County?

Around San Diego County, a hot, salty, buttered controversy has popped up.

Should hardware stores offer free bags of freshly popped popcorn?

While that may look like a warm, welcoming treat, free popcorn is a threat to public health — or so argue county officials. Last month, health inspectors raided La Jolla’s Meanley & Son Hardware, warning that its old-fashioned red popcorn machine is a germy outlaw.

“They explained we didn’t have the proper permits,” said Bob Meanley, whose shop had handed out 30 to 40 bags every day for about 25 years.

To comply with the 1984 California Uniform Retail Food Facility Law, Meanley & Son would need to install a three-basin sink to clean and sterilize the popcorn popper. Also required: regular inspections, just like a restaurant.

Meanley declined and instead rolled the offending machine into storage. Thus ended a tradition he had started 25 years ago.

“I hate to take away something that our customers really like,” said Meanley, whose grandparents founded the hardware store in 1948. …

The county Department of Environmental Health, for its part, has a long tradition of cracking down on these scofflaws. Three years ago, inspectors cited Encinitas’ Crown Ace Hardware and San Carlos True Value Hardware.

“The Health Department came in,” said San Carlos True Value manager Danielle Matheny, “and told us if we wanted to continue giving away free popcorn and coffee we’d have to install a bigger vent system, a bigger and better sink in the break room — a lot of rules and restrictions they put on us.”

In both Encinitas and San Carlos, the stores dropped the practice. Inspectors so far have ignored Payton’s, but El-Hajj figures it’s just a matter of time.

“I feel sad,” she said, “that some of the old traditions we have become so regulated.”

RTWT

Investors Business Daily cites a George Mason University Study of the compliance cost of federal regulations which finds that those costs are truly staggering.

Economists scratch their heads when asked to explain the economy’s tepid growth over the past several years. A new study gives a possible answer: the growing, cumulative burden of federal regulations.

Under President Obama, annual GDP growth never once even hit 3%. Under Bush before him, there were only two years when growth topped 3%. But in the two decades before that, annual GDP growth was above 3% in all but six years.

Growth has been so anemic for so long, we’re now being told that this is the “new normal.” As the Bureau of Labor Statistics put it, “annual U.S. GDP growth exceeding 3% … is not expected to be attainable over the coming decade.” It lists everything as a cause, except for one thing: federal regulations.

Whenever a new regulation gets passed, the government puts out a cost analysis, which focuses on annual compliance costs. That’s fine for a point in time. But these regulations don’t go away. And every year more get added to the pile. The Code of Federal Regulations is now more than 81,000 pages long.

What’s the cumulative impact of all these rules, EDIT3-regu-042616regulations and mandates over several decades? A new study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University tries to get an answer, and what it found is mind-boggling.

The paper looked at regulations imposed since 1977 on 22 different industries, their actual growth, and what might have happened if all those regulations had not been imposed.

What it found is that if the regulatory state had remained frozen in place in 1980, the economy would have been $4 trillion — or 25% — bigger than it was in 2012. That’s equal to almost $13,000 per person in that one year alone.

Looked at another way, if the economic growth lost to regulation in the U.S. were its own country, it would be the fourth largest economy in the world, as the nearby chart shows.

Read the whole thing.