the Incredible Regulatory Follies; R. Reiland

Raymond Raines, a fifth-grader in a St. Louis public school, was placed in de tention for a week after committing a faux pas in the school cafeteria. Raymond's mis deed was bowing his head in prayer and silently saying grace. School officials, allegedly interested in diversity, invoked shunning to maintain uniformity. Raymond was told he'd have to eat by himself in a separate room until he conformed. Noone can explain to this II-year-old why Congress spends $210,000 every year for chaplains to begin each day with a prayer and yet he can't quietly bow his head over a cheeseburger. In Boston, a kid opening a lemonade stand must get permission from five different gov ernment agencies and pay $335 in fees and licenses. The city also requires the budding entrepreneur to comply with dozens of com plex food and building ordinances and carry $500,000in liability insurance. "Massachu setts," wrote Ted Levinson in The Free man, "frowns upon the ramshackle wooden Mr. Reiland is associate professor of economics at Robert Morris College in Pittsburgh, Penn sylvania.

lemonade stands set upon the lawn that Norman Rockwell would paint. " A Boy Scout from Chicago, Bobby Gra ham, got a taste of government red tape when he got separated from his troop and was lost in New Mexico's Santa Fe National Forest. After two days and nights of search ing, police helicopters finally spotted him and requested authorization from the Forest Service to land and bring him back. Citing a regulation that "mechanized vehicles" are prohibited in wilderness areas, the Forest Service denied the rescue helicopter per mission to land. The Forest Service also forbids the operation of a "musical instru ment near a campfire or adjacent to a body of water." Robyn Lerman, a 6-year-old in Highland Park, Illinois, discovered that she couldn't put her pulled tooth under her pillow with out violating Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations. OSHA, explained her dentist, requires human tis sue, including teeth, to be immediately placed in a closed container for proper disposal. The Tooth Fairy became illegalthe same month that the Center for Science in the Public Interest declared movie popcorn to be lethal.

For disadvantaged kids in California, the listing of fairy shrimp as an endangered species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser vice led to eviction from Pastor Bob Raup' s ranch for troubled children and a quick trip 553 554 THE FREEMAN • AUGUST 1996 back to inner-city killing fields. Raup, a chaplain with the Sacramento SherifI's Of fice, created a getaway ranch where at-risk kids could ride horses and get counseling. Even though the minuscule fairy shrimp can be found thriving by the hundreds of thou sands in railroad ditches and water-filled abandoned tires, the central planners rank endangered kids a step below endangered crustaceans. Children may not be allowed to selllem onade, pray, be rescued, take their baby teeth home, or play the guitar next to a lake, but government regulators are working to insure that they'll be able to eat all the clean dirt they can handle. Taxpayers in Colum bia, Mississippi, were forced to pay $20 millionto haul dirt away from an old lumber mill site so it would be clean enough for a child to safely eat a teaspoon of dirt every month for 70 years.

Curiouser and Curiouser Unfortunately, these kids will find out soon enough that the rules don't get any less bizarre when they get older. Under a new no-ogling policy in Minneapolis, it's a firing offense for a city construction worker to stare too long at a passing female. A city agency in Los Angeles closed the Odd Ball Cabaret, a strip joint, under the Americans with Disabilities Act because a shower stall on stage wasn't accessible to strippers in wheelchairs. It didn't matter that no handicapped strippers had applied for work, just as no blind drivers had com plained about a Kansas City bank before regulators ordered the installation of a $5,000Braille keypad on an automatic teller machine in the drive-through lane. After the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission declared obesity to be a pro tected job disability, a 410-pound applicant for the job of subway train conductor dragged the New,York City Transit Author ity into court. Unhired and simply too large to fit in the small· cab of the train, the applicant claimed the Authority didn't make "reasonable accommodations."

Nothing is too small to become a federal case. Under OSHA rules, the smoking and gum chewing by America's roofers are matters of national labor policy, while a Florida business was cited for failing to place a warning label on a bottle of Joy dishwashing liquid. For a shoeshine stand in the courthouse lobby, Bergen County in New Jersey issued a full 18 pages of regu lations. The smock, only burgundy or dark brown, must be knee length and wrap around, with pockets. "The Lord's Prayer is 66 words," says policy analyst Thomas D. Hopkins, "while government regulations on the sale of cab bages total 26,911words." Someone has too much time on his hands. In California, the Department of Fair Employment and Hous ing ordered newspaper editors to remove "family room" and "master bedroom" from real estate ads. Even "nice neighbor hood" was ruled to be insensitive. The Best Laid Schemes . . . It was mice and the federal government in California who thwarted John Thorpe's plans to develop the upland portion of his property. Regulators, after discovering salt marsh harvest mice on the lower levels of Thorpe's land, envisioned an apoc alypse: global warming might melt the polar ice caps, the Pacific Ocean would rise, and the mice would be forced up Thorpe's hill. No new building was permitted. The fate of California's jobless contractors took a back seat to rodents and science fiction.

Allthese regulatory follies might be funny ifit weren't for the costs. By most estimates, federal regulations impose costs on Ameri can workers and consumers of $500 billion per year, or $5,000 per family. In terms of lost jobs, the U.S. economy operates with an estimated 10 million fewer jobs because of federal regulations, according to studies by economist William Laffer. In the North west, over 30,000 logging jobs were de stroyed when federal planners mistakenly theorized that spotted owls could only live in old trees. Last year, the average American had to work full-time until July 10 to pay his or her share of the combined costs of taxes, gov ernment spending, and federal mandates and regulations, according to a recent Amer icans for Tax Reform study. I wonder what our Founding Fathers would say about mice having the right to the top of anyone's property, the government timingofogling, and kids being shunned into conformity by school bureaucrats or being AncientLessons by James A. Maccaro T he history of ancient Rome repeatedly demonstrates the connection between low taxes and prosperity. It also shows the connection between confiscatory taxes and political and social unrest.