A graph on the growth of the regulatory state, courtesy of the National Review Corner blog.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
A picture says a thousand wordsAugust 19th, 2011 |
 3 comments to A picture says a thousand words |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
I see everyone is left speechlees – so amI…
Indeed.
If anyone wonders what is wrong with the global economy, I guess they need look no further.
Very simply, strangled by the most comprehensive of parasites.
An interesting graph, to be sure, and I don’t question that it is a valid depiction of a disturbing trend. But comparing percentages can be deceptive. I would have preferred to see, at least somewhere in the text of the article, the raw numbers. After all, a 5% increase on a base of, say, 100, pales in significance next to a 1.4% increase on a base of 10,000. (Obviously, I made up those numbers for illustrative purposes.) Is it really meaningful? We can’t really tell.
If you drill through the Veronique de Rugy article linked here to the John Merline article which is her source, there actually is a little more data, albeit not much. He states that “employment at these agencies has climbed 13% since Obama took office to more than 281,000.” If that’s truly an increase of 13% during Obama’s term, it still represents only about 32,000 individuals. An unfortunate trend, to be sure (at a time when we need fewer regulations and regulators, not more), but not a huge number in a nation of 300 million people.