Reforms intended to cut red tape and free the market often generate new regulatory and administrative structures.
Graeber's 2015 argument, and the mirror image of Pournelle's iron law from the left. Deregulation programmes have often produced compliance regimes, monitoring bodies and reporting requirements that did not previously exist.
In practice
- A programme to remove twelve pages of procurement guidance produces a fourteen-page framework for assessing whether guidance is necessary.
- A deregulation drive creates an office to certify that regulations have been reviewed, staffed by people who previously wrote them.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is that removing a rule creates the need to verify that the freed activity is safe, so deregulation generates monitoring, reporting and compliance staff in place of the rule it removed.
- In its favour
- Compliance regimes following deregulation are documented in finance, health and utilities, and the pattern mirrors Pournelle's iron law and Conquest's second law from the opposite political direction.
- Against it
- It is stated as a law from selected cases, nobody has counted administrative burden before and after deregulation across a representative sample, and some deregulation has reduced paperwork as intended.
- Standing
- The mirror image of Pournelle's iron law and of Conquest's second law, advanced from the left.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline