Regulation and the Death of the Small

Small businesses are drowning under an intolerable burden

Photo by Victor Ajayi on Unsplash

I despise fire door signs. This may seem a rather peculiar disposition (and to caveat, I appreciate their functionality in times of emergency), but in my opinion, it is a perfectly rational reaction — especially to those who value aesthetics. For some absurd reason, these blue circles with white exclamation marks¹ — devoid of even the faintest hint of beauty — seem to have a habit of popping up in the most aesthetically infuriating of places. Case in point: I once saw a picture of a huge and beautiful old wooden door, probably in excess of five hundred years old, with a large “fire door” sign stuck slap-bang in the middle of it. Ridiculous! The door was prominent enough for everyone to realise that it would serve as an exit in the case of a fire², but Health and Safety decided to desecrate the Ancient with the epitome of modern aesthetic sterility. Welcome to the age of safety, I suppose. Or perhaps, welcome to the age of over-enthusiastic regulation.

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It is safe to say that regulation is a ubiquitous feature of this modern, hyper risk-adverse world. Everything it seems is the subject of regulation: the constitution of car exhaust, sugar levels in food, disturbance of bats and Great Crested Newts, and the maximum allowance of sewage in our rivers³, all this and more is regulated by some arm of the state — even the correct shape of cucumbers used to be regulated⁴. Undoubtedly, some regulations have caused much good. The Great Smog’s of the 50s in London were by no means conducive to respiratory health, and it is laudable that most factory workers in this country, who work tirelessly to keep the cogs of economic growth turning, no longer have to worry about being killed by dangerous machinery (instead they only have to worry about being fired for not being efficient enough). Closer to my home, recently introduced regulation has improved my living standards. I am a great advocate of the 20mph speed limit in pedestrian areas making our roads more humane — suited to human life, not human death. Even more so, someone who was almost hospitalised because of severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder 10 years ago (such as myself⁵) should be celebrating the exponential growth of safety-inducing regulation. Yet, despite all this worthy good, I lament the sterile and somewhat boring world I have inherited.

What grieves me most, beyond the loss of aesthetic purity (though that is a great loss), is how time and time again regulation serves to kill off the good, the local, and the small in favour of the big, the bad, and the ugly. The abundance of regulation in the modern era has led to the phenomenon of ‘overregulation’, which has crippled and constrained many a small or traditional business with burdens their limited manpower and empty bank balances simply cannot handle. In this scenario, regulation serves as a ‘public bad’ rather than a public good. And this is a travesty.