@farmerman,
No Republican president or Congress is going to eliminate all governmental regulation; nor should they.
To rationalize regulation as a vital source of innovation however, is like suggesting that hunger is a good thing because it gets people to work.
There is a market for safer and more fuel efficent cars that doesn't require the help of regulation, and what government regulations have spurred Detroit to build better quality vehicles?
Sarbanes Oxley was a fabulous gift to accounting firms. You remember those guys, the ones who you likely wished to tar and feather around the time of Enron.
The costs of compliance for public companies have far exceeed the original estimates, and unless one wishes to argue that without SOX the Financial Meltdown would have destroyed the earth's core, the regulations were of virtually no help in preventing the Great Recession.
You will find statistics that indicate SOX costs are declining but this is because corporations are scaling back on compliance. This is a calculated risk on the part of management because they have not seen cases of significant SOX related penalties. There is, of course, no assurance that such penalties will not be imposed tomorrow.
SOX requires companies to document control processes. The accounting firms that are making millions of dollars conducting SOX audits do not test the efficacy of the controls, only whether or not they are written down and certain members of an organization can parrot them.
The notion that SOX has increased the objectivity and independence of auditing firms is ridiculous. It has increased the activity and billable hours of these firms though.
Obviously we can't know what might have happened in corporate America if SOX had not been enacted, but we do know what happened since it was enacted and it hardly can lay claim to silver bullet status.
There is a place for government oversight and regulation, but it always ovvereaches.
The FDA is a good example.
I welcome a governmental agency making sure that drugs and remedies being sold to the public won't kill people. I don't, however accept that we need such an agency to tell us whether or not these drugs and remedies are effective.
The FDA has an organizational bias towards delaying approval, because it only comes under fire if it is perceived to have too hastily approved a drug. Although there is no shortage of statistics concerning the victims of certain drugs, who is keeping track of the number of people who would have benefited (and, indeed, lived) if a drug had been approved sooner?
By extension, your argument suggests that the more regulations, the better for the economy, or that you believe governmental regulators are near perfect technocrats.
This is simply not the case.
