The law of unintended consequences has really struck in the case of our company. As an executive who has done a lot of transactions, a lot of acquisitions, a lot of mergers, a lot of spin-offs, and all the things that one does to try to run an entrepreneurial business, I can tell you that you spend much more time on the rules and how to get around them than you do trying to make the business work and trying to do a good job for your customers. That is really sad. And what's even sadder is that in 1994 the consensus was that we needed to fix the regulatory environment, that we really needed to roll back the role of government, and that regulation really did represent a very, very expensive and anti-productive burden on our society. But I still spend all my time with the Federal Trade Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Businesses run into artificial barriers everywhere.
They are very limiting, and they make no sense. So thank God for outfits like Cato that are coming at the problem from an intellectual perspective and trying to educate the American public about how burdensome regulations really are.