Have you ever seen all the rules our state uses to regulate us? If you have trouble sleeping some night, take a look around here: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/rules/?view=list It’s no wonder the Minnesota payroll has ballooned to almost 390,000 people. We regulate everything! There are 103 agencies monitoring 807 chapters of rules. Each chapter can contain up to dozens of parts. Each part can contain dozens of rules. It’s an ocean of detail requiring platoons of bureaucrats just to maintain the list of rules! After 30 minutes of browsing I promise you will be asleep.
But tonight I found Tim Pawlenty’s missing budget $Billion(s). Read on…
State statute is impossible to read without a statute guide like the one on the legislature website to organize them. A printed set of statutes is a meaningless ocean of complexity. Click around on the link above and you will find that licenses and inspections are common rule sets. For example, I clicked on the rules governing petroleum fuel tanks. The rules contained pages of details about everything from inspections to handling the cleanup costs in a spill. Without rules, people would store volatile fuels and chemicals in hazardous ways. People would eventually get hurt. It is certain that somebody got hurt once. So the state created rules to prevent it from happening again and hired inspectors to monitor.
These rules contain the reason for our bloated government. But you can hardly argue with a “rule” that requires fuel to be stored in a responsible way. We experience ‘bloat’ because every time the people have trouble or get hurt, the state jumps in and creates a myriad of rules and hires whole departments to track compliance with the rules. The system is designed ad hoc by committee in an attempt to prevent the damage from happening again. People get hurt. The state needs to do something about it. But the way we do it is very inefficient.
There are rules in these chapters for how much rat fecal material can be found in a restaurant kitchen and continue to operate. There are people on the state payroll, running around the state in state owned vehicles, wearing state provided uniforms, crawling around under the counters on their hands and knees counting the rat fecal material, weighing what they find, and certifying their findings. Inspectors make good money. They even have supervisors, assistants, and support staff. And everybody gets a pension, health benefits, and vacation pay. It balloons the payroll to 390,000 people in short order.
A more efficient way to do it would be using PEER REVIEWS.
I don’t mean to get the night crew at “Joe’s Hot Dog House” to inspect the “Eat Here and Get Gas Café.” Instead of the monolithic bureaucracy, tell the restaurants they need to have an insurance policy to cover people from the harmful effects of rat fecal material in their breakfast eggs. The insurance companies assess premiums based on risk. And if somebody gets hurt, then let the state investigate. Damages will be paid to those harmed. A substantial, possibly identical amount, can be assessed as a penalty for failing to comply with some basic standard established by the rules. Use the rules to require the insurance company to provide for independent inspections, or provide one as part of their underwriting.
By changing the way we do business, the Governor gets to fire an army of inspectors, delete another department from the biennial budget, sell a small fleet of state owned cars, terminate the benefits and cash out their pensions. The restaurants can fight amongst themselves to get a peer review structure for their industry. They all share in the risk pool and pay premiums based on current conditions and their experience with the restaurant. A vibrant food-handling insurance industry is born.
Most importantly, the state is out of the fecal matter measurement business. Win-win-win… The people win. The state wins. And the restaurants win.
This same set of principles can be applied to just about every “inspection” department on the state payroll.
Hasta la vista Department of “fill in the blank” Inspections.
I think I just found Tim Pawlenty’s missing $Billion(s).