The rising spectre of intrusive regulation
When Friedrich Hayek published his still controversial Road to Serfdom in 1944 his main target was the belief, deriving ultimately from German and Soviet propagandists, that because a centrally-directed economy had seemed to work so well in time of war, it should be continued in peacetime. Hayek believed that this was not only an economic error but a threat to wider personal freedoms. Today, no country, with the possible exception of Cuba, tries to run a centrally-directed war economy.
As the rest of the 20th century rolled on, Hayek and others spied a new danger. This was that public expenditure would take over from state ownership and state direction as the threat to freedom. But beneath the comings and goings of the electoral and business cycles, the upward creep of public expenditure has ground to a halt at little above 40 per cent of GDP in Britain, somewhat less in the US and somewhat more in the eurozone. At around this level taxation meets a resistance point. Although some economic liberals are unhappy with the extent of state provision of public services, there is no longer the inexorable forward march that alarmed even political moderates, such as Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey, in the 1970s.
There is now a third danger. This is the upward creep of regulation. Here is a threat to business enterprise and the realisation of anything like the so-called “Lisbon agenda” for encouraging enterprise in the EU. But it is only one aspect of a much wider collectivist creep that tries to regulate what adults can do in the light of the latest and often conflicting papers coming across the prime minister's desk. On both sides of the Atlantic, professional advice on how to cope with regulators could well be the most rapidly growing industry, as small and medium-sized companies are becoming more and more fearful of getting into bed with these bodies on their own.
Regulation, however well intended, has now reached a point where it threatens to kill the goose that lays the economic golden eggs. At the annual City Debate organised by the Futures and Options Association in 2002, a motion asserting that “regulation keeps reinventing itself to hide the inevitability of its failure” was lost by 60 to 40 per cent of those present. When it was put again this January, without discussion, it was carried by 81 per cent to 19 per cent. The reason I was given was that the superimposition of EU regulations on UK ones was becoming ridiculous.
It is often rightly said that in the US the litigation culture has similar effects to the legislative overload in Europe. Nevertheless, there has been a large liberalising advance in the US on other fronts. For instance, a study by Paul London, a former undersecretary for commerce in the Clinton Administration, details the “massive and bipartisan” resurgence of competition in the US economy which he thinks was the main reason for its advance in the 1990s*. He gives examples of how competition during the 1990s broke down old and unimaginative oligopolies that dominated industries such as automobiles and steel, telecommunications, transportation, finance and retailing. A succession of presidents, regulators, and Congresses gave bipartisan political support to the new challengers in every one of these sectors.
An attempt has been made by the free-market Adam Smith Institute to see how Britain can make a similar leap forward or more accurately, avoid several steps backwards on the regulatory front**. Those who fear that it will have an anti-EU slant can relax. There is no call to leave the European Union; the constitutional treaty is consigned to an appendix and the euro is hardly touched on at all.
Indeed, the report is indifferent to the relative EU and Whitehall shares in regulation. “What matters is the total amount of red tape.” In areas where EU directives are in force, existing UK regulations should be presumed unnecessary and subject to a one-year sunset clause. But the 16,000 pages of the Acquis Communitaire needs radical consolidation; and the EU itself needs a value-for-money watchdog like Britain's National Audit Office to do a cost benefit analysis for all new regulations.
The UK is now awash with so-called statutory consumer interest bodies. Only 2 per cent of consumers, for instance, have heard of Energy Watch. Regulators should rely instead on more competition, and small businesses should have to face only two officials one for tax and one for all other regulation. The government of Tony Blair, in its search for triangulation, substituted better regulation for deregulation bodies. The report suggests going back to the latter; and more is likely to be achieved by a few rules of good conduct and competition than by thousands of pages of detailed prescriptions.
But more telling than any of this nitty gritty is the following quotation: “Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious parts of the public into hangers-on of the government, or at some party which aims at becoming the government.”
Which Third Way thinker penned these words? It was John Stuart Mill in his 1859 essay On Liberty. What more is there to be said?
www.samuelbrittan.co.uk* Paul London, The Competition Solution, AEI Press
** Tim Ambler and Keith Boyfield, Road Map to Reform, Adam Smith Institute
监管：别杀了下金蛋的鹅
当弗里德里希?哈耶克(Friedrich Hayek)1944年发表至今仍有争议的《通向奴役之路》(The Road to Serfdom)一书时，他主要是针对一个信念，这信念源于德国和苏联的宣传机构，认为由于中央指令型经济在战时似乎很管用，因此在和平时期应当继续推行。哈耶克相信，这个信念不仅是经济上的错误，而且会威胁范围更广的个人自由。如今，可能除了古巴以外，没有哪个国家试图运作中央指令型的战时经济体。
随着20世纪余下的时间一天天过去，哈耶克和其他人发现了一个新的危险，这就是公共支出将取代国家所有制和国家指令，成为对自由的威胁。但是，在周而复始的大选和商业周期之下，英国公共支出的攀升趋势逐渐放慢，现在已停在略高于40%的水平上，而美国则稍低、欧元区稍高些。在这个水平上下，税收遇到了阻力位。尽管一些经济自由主义人士对国家提供公共服务的程度感到不满，但公共支出再也不像上世纪70年代那样一路上升，当时就连罗伊?杰金斯(Roy Jenkins)和丹尼斯?希利(Denis Healey)等政治温和派人士也对这种势头感到吃惊。
现在还有第三个危险，这就是监管正在慢慢增加，于是对商界的创业行为构成了威胁，还危及任何像《里斯本议程》(Lisbon agenda)之类计划的实现，这些计划旨在鼓励欧盟的创业行为。但这只是广泛得多的集体主义思潮泛滥的一个方面，这种思潮试图以呈交到首相办公桌上最新的、而且往往互相矛盾的文件为依据，去管束成人们可以做些什么。纵观在大西洋两岸，就如何应付监管者而提供的专业咨询服务可能已成为发展最快的行业，因为中小型企业正越来越害怕独自与这些监管机构打交道。
不管原来的用意多么好，监管行为已经到了在经济上会杀死下金蛋的鹅的地步。在期货与期权协会(Futures and Options Association)2002年组织的年度金融城辩论会(City Debate)上，一项动议因与会者中60％反对40％赞成而被否决。该动议称，“监管不断改头换面，以掩藏其失败的必然性”。当这项动议在今年1月再次被提出时，未经讨论便以81%对19%票数通过。我所得到的解释是，将欧盟的监管条例强加在英国监管条例上已变得很荒谬。
美国动辄诉讼的文化与欧洲动辄立法的做法确有相似的效果，这种说法通常是对的。但在其它方面，美国已在自由化方面遥遥领先。例如，克林顿时期的前商务部副部长保罗?伦敦(Paul London)有一份研究报告，详细描述了美国经济中“巨大的、获两党支持的”竞争复兴，他认为这是美国在上世纪90年代*进步的主要原因。他举例说明上世纪90年代期间的竞争如何打破了陈旧而呆板的寡头垄断，这种垄断一度主宰着汽车、钢铁、电信、交通、金融以及零售行业。历届总统、监管机构和国会都对上述每个部门的新挑战者给予来自两个党派的政治支持。
自由市场学派的亚当?史密斯学院(Adam Smith Institute)做了一项尝试，研究英国怎样才能实现与美国类似的跃进，或者更确切地说，避免监管方面的一些倒退**。那些担心英国会有反欧盟倾向的人可以松一口气了。目前并没有要求摆脱欧盟的呼吁，宪法性条约被放进了附录，而欧元几乎没有被提及。
的确，这份报告并不关心欧盟和英国政府在监管中的相对比重。“重要的是监管行为的总量。”在欧盟发布指令的领域，现有的英国监管应被认为没有必要，而且应当容许一年期的日落条款。但1.6万页的《欧盟现行法》(Acquis Communitaire)需要彻底整合；而欧盟本身需要一个物有所值、类似英国国家审计署(National Audit Office)的监督机构，对所有新的监管措施进行成本收益分析。
英国现在充斥着所谓的法定消费者利益机构。比如说，只有2%的消费者听说过“能源观察”(Energy Watch)。监管者应当转而依赖更多的竞争，小企业应当只需面对两个官员：一个是税务官，另一个负责其它方面的监管。为寻求三方监管，托尼?布莱尔(Tony Blair)政府以更好的监管取代了解除管制机构。而报告建议恢复那些解除管制机构；同时认为，相比成千上万页详细的规定，就良好的行为和竞争定立为数不多的准则可能会取得更多成果。
但是以下一段引文要比任何此类繁文缛节更能说明问题：“在政府已经发挥的那些职能上添加每一项功能，都使政府对更多人的希望和担忧造成影响，并越来越多地把积极且有抱负的那部分公众转变为政府的依附者，或是某个有意执政党派的依附者。”
到底是哪位“第三条道路”思想家写了这段话？是约翰?斯图亚特?米勒(John Stuart Mill)，在他1859年发表的《论自由》(On Liberty)一文中。那还有什么可说的？
www.samuelbrittan.co.uk
