Opportunity cost

Jan. 9, 2012

Great editorial: "Regulations and jobs" (OGJ, Nov. 28, 2011, p. 16). How intellectually dishonest of EPA to ignore the well-known economic concept of "opportunity cost" as they impose extreme restrictions on power-plant emissions! They and Obama pull that kind of deception on the general public, that isn’t well-informed about opportunity cost, all the time. I guess we should be accustomed to such dishonesty from this administration by now.

An economist once gave me a simple way of looking at job creation. He stated that any activity

that produces wages, without producing a commensurate quantity of products for those wage-earners to buy, is inflationary. Thus wars are always inflationary, even though military wages are not high, just as these regulations on the power industry will be inflationary. I’ve heard that the true cross of regulations is over $1 trillion/year.

If the government would set the tons of stifling regulations aside for 5 years with a "regulations

holiday" we would see an explosion of jobs and economic activity that would boggle the mind. Then they could slowly bring back only those regulations that are truly needed.