On his radio show today, Dennis Prager talks to Iain Murray, Vice President of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. His new book is Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You.
Dennis: “What would happen to the country if half of the civil servants were laid off?”
Iain: “Because these people wouldn’t be there to impose rules and regulations strangling America. About half of GDP is taken out of wealth creation and wasted on public administration. There would be a vast freeing up of wealth to go into productive causes. Businesses would spring up overnight. If they allowed federal land to be opened up to mineral extraction, there would be an energy boom that would take massive numbers of people off the unemployment rolls.”
Dennis: “So the issue with government employees is not just the fact that there are so many of them, that they are there stifling creativity.”
Iain: “We don’t need to teach the grass to grow. We just need to move the rocks. They’re the rocks.”
Dennis: “The entire left argues that the reason for this recession was the deregulation of Wall Street.”
Iain: “That’s completely bunkum. Before the financial crisis, there were 115 bodies looking after the financial regulation. They make sure that banks spend so much money on box checking and abiding by regulation is one of the reason that they are frozen. Without this regulation, people would be more reliant on judgment rather than ticking the right boxes. They’d be much more vigilant about what’s happening in the subprime housing market.”
