Government Regulation: Crash Course Government #47 Today, we're going to wrap up our discussion of economic policy by looking at government regulation. We're going to talk about the government's goals for the U.S. economy and the policies it employs to achieve those goals.
All of these goals of economic policy, promoting stable markets, promoting economic prosperity, fostering business development and protecting employees and consumers are interrelated and important.
Definition. A Regulation is an official rule. In the Government, certain administrative agencies have a narrow authority to control conduct, within their areas of responsibility. These agencies have been delegated legislative power to create and apply the rules, or "regulations". Derived from "regulate".
Regulations, also called administrative laws or rules, are the primary vehicles by which the federal government implements laws and agency objectives. They are specific standards or instructions concerning what individuals, businesses, and other organizations can or cannot do.
Government regulation is a double-edged sword. By restricting the inputs—capital, labor, technology, and more—that can be used in the production process, regulation shapes the economy and, by extension, living standards today and in the future.
social regulation and economic regulation.
Regulation reduces total U.S. employment by at least three million jobs. Another heavy cost of regulation is reduced employment opportunities for Americans. This toll is not usually apparent, because in most instances regulation merely leads to a slower growth in employment rather than to visible loss in existing jobs.
Government Regulation. Use of Government authority to control or change some practice in the private sector.
According to the Federal Reserve, financial regulation has two main intended purposes: to ensure the safety and soundness of the financial system and to provide and enforce rules that aim to protect consumers.
Federal agencies have the power to enforce those laws through regulation. State lawmakers, in turn, make laws that typically supplement federal legislation. State government regulation examples include setting a higher minimum wage than the federal requirement.
Such regulations can limit pollution, increase worker safety, discourage unfair business practices, and contribute in many other ways to a safer, healthier, more productive, and more equitable society.
The OMB's draft report estimated that major federal regulations provide benefits of from $135 billion to $218 billion annually while costing taxpayers between $38 billion and $44 billion.
“The purpose of much federal regulation is to provide protection, either to individuals, or to the environment.” When a new standard is set – from smog emissions to how banks interact – it equates to more regulations.
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If there were no national regulations, and states were allowed to set the rules, then it might be possible for car makers in Detroit to build cars that live up to the mileage standards in Michigan, but not in California, and that would be anarchy.
But since nobody wants a malfunctioning market, most of the things the government does to create a market system also work to make the system stable and predictable. Maintaining law and order and minimizing monopolies are examples of government actions that make the market system stable.
In response to some of the abuses of the Gilded Age, Congress passed its first wave of regulatory legislation. In addition to the ICC, Congress created the Federal Trade Commission to regulate trade and the Sherman and Clayton Acts to try to counter the problem of monopolies.
The fourth goal of government economic policy is to protect consumers and employees. A lot of people will tell you that the federal government doesn’t do much to protect employees these days, and those people are probably right, but in the past it certainly did.
You can find out more about inflation from Crash Course: Economics, but the main tool the government uses to control inflation is the Federal Reserve, which is so complicated that it gets its own episode. A third goal of government economic policy, one closely related to the first two, is promoting business development.
Economic policy can be dangerous. Specifically, we’re going to look at some of the broad goals of economic policy and some of the things that the government does to try to accomplish those goals. And we may even provide some examples of times when the government did accomplish them, so take that, skeptics.