Business Regulation Quotes & Sayings

Politicians also have a love affair with the 'small business exemption.' Too much paperwork? Too heavy a burden? Not enough time? Just exempt small businesses from the rule. It sounds so pro-growth. Instead it's an admission that the costs of a regulation just can't be justified. — John Sununu

I saw how the regulation I called for made things worse, didn't help consumers and simple competition was better. And I started praising business and occasionally criticizing regulation. — John Stossel

Sociologists of regulation - such people exist - talk about something called 'regulatory capture'. This is the process whereby a state regulator ends up promoting the interests of the industry it is supposed to monitor, at the expense of the public interest. It can happen for a number of reasons, and many of them are very human. For example, if you work in the technical business o f drug approval and pharmacovigilance, who can you chat to about your day's work? To your partner, it's all baffling and pedantic; but to the people in the regulatory affairs division of the companies you work with every day, they understand. You have so much in common with them. So industry bodies - not even necessarily the pharmaceutical companies themselves - might offer things as intangible as friendship, and opportunities to socialize. — Ben Goldacre

The larger Europe grows, the more diverse must be the forms of co-operation it requires. Instead of a centralised bureaucracy, the model should be a market - not only a market of individuals and companies, but also a market in which the players are governments.
Thus governments would compete with each other for foreign investments, top management and high earners through lower taxes and less regulation.
Such a market would impose a fiscal discipline on governments because they would not want to drive away expertise and business.
It would also help to establish which fiscal and regulatory policies produced the best overall economic results.
No wonder socialists don't like it. — Margaret Thatcher

"The ultimate recession": a recession caused not by failed regulation and bankers' greed, but by very high oil prices, food and water shortages, disappearing forests, accelerating climate change, forced migration and mass civil disruption ... The long and the short of it, unfortunately, is this: more politicians still believe that economic recovery depends on continuing to live beyond our means (financially and ecologically) than on learning to live within our means. And that's why the ultimate "Perfect Storm" recession still looms on the horizon — Jonathon Porritt

I used to be a businessman and I enjoyed what I did and I thought that it was socially useful. I don't have anything against business or private enterprise or capitalism per se, but I think that it is time to rethink the regulation of capitalism. — Charles Ferguson

The men of wealth who today are trying to prevent the regulation and control of their business in the interest of the public by the proper government authorities will not succeed, in my judgment, in checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed they would find that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind, for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by steady and natural growth. — Theodore Roosevelt

Every time you have a new tax, or every time you have to pay really an inordinate amount for a regulation, it's really stifling this country and really stifling American business. — John Raese

If we remain fearful, then we will be further stripped of power as we barrel towards this neofeudalistic state where there is a world of masters and serfs, a kind of permanent underclass. That's what's happening; that's what's being created. Rapacious corporate business interests have shattered all kinds of regulations and controls. They have carried out a coup d'etat in slow motion. And it's over; they've won. — Chris Hedges

The road to recovery is to stimulate small business and innovation by reducing taxation, regulation, and litigation. — Sandy Adams

Liberals conceptualize government regulation as the protection of those who cannot protect themselves - protection of citizens, workers, honest businessmen, and the environment against possible harm by unscrupulous or negligent businesses and individuals. Government regulation of business is there to be sure that businesses don't hurt or cheat anyone. — George Lakoff

Somebody has to tell the E.P.A. that we don't need you monkeying around and fiddling around and getting in our business with every kind of regulation you can dream up. You're doing nothing more than killing jobs. It's a cemetery for jobs at the E.P.A. — Rick Perry

The question is not whether we should or should not regulate; it
is how much should we regulate and who the regulators should
be. We went overboard on deregulation under Reagan. Under
Bush, many people lost in the casino. Now we have the Obama
administration overreacting and overreaching with regulation that
does the exact opposite of wealth creation. If we are to have change
we can believe in, then we could start by replacing the majority
of the lawyers in regulatory agencies with actual experienced, successful
business veterans. They would have recognized the early warning
signs of many of the financial debacles created by the bubble-bust
cycle. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a
totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the true name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive rerouting of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation. — Peter Ludlow

We vetoed five income tax increases during my time as governor. We cut business taxes $2.3 billion, and we cut regulation by one-third of what my predecessor put in place. — Chris Christie

Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory. — Alan Greenspan

How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong. — John Stuart Mill

Leaving [from EU] will allow us to return real democratic control to important areas of national life; from international trade, the right to work and live in Britain to business regulation. — Gisela Stuart

Liberals say they are for civil liberties and personal freedom, but they continue to advocate government regulation of business, redistribution of wealth, and various forms of social engineering to manipulate human relationships and attitudes. — Richard Ebeling

Complex regulation in place of simple-rules capitalism disrupts market processes and corrupts business incentives. — Robert L. Bradley Jr.

Energy and environmental regulation, transportation, and broadband policy all benefit when legislators have a basic grounding in the technical concepts behind business models, products, and innovation. — John Sununu

Korea can't become a 'first-class' nation unless regulation and 'a sense of power' disappear. The nation's politics is the fourth-class, bureaucratic are the third-class, and business is the second-class. — Lee Kun-hee

A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad. — Theodore Roosevelt

goal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification" is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. His finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities. — Daniel Goleman

Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business. — Clayton Christensen

Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth. — Theodore Roosevelt

We have lost that which has made us great over the generations, and that is the sense of individual and personal responsibility that we can come up, we can pursue our dreams and our aspirations and we won't be blocked by government regulation, by the inability to get a loan as a small business to make our dreams come true. — Jon Huntsman Jr.

The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace. — Thomas Frank

In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination
until after it's run through a grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources ... It's like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you
just so she can't point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap. — Anthony Bourdain

The God worth worshipping is the one who pays us the compliment of self - regulation, and we might return it by minding our own business. — Roger Rosenblatt

The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism. — Theodore Roosevelt

What we lack is a good, strong business climate with lower taxes, fairer regulation. — Kevin Brady

Is regulation per se bad? Is better regulation bad? I think better regulation is good for the business community, and I think that's something we should get together on. — Ed Rendell

They say that Japan's rigorous building codes and regulations saved thousands of lives over there. Or, as Republicans here saw it, it 'fostered a socialist, anti-business environment that's worse than being dead.' — Bill Maher

Certainly, the job of a U.S. senator is to create a climate conducive to creating jobs, which is lower taxes and less government regulation. What Harry Reid has been doing is putting forward those policies that actually put more regulation on business. — Sharron Angle

Regulation is strangling businesses of all sizes in California, and we've got to streamline regulation so it's easy, not hard, to do business. — Meg Whitman

Here in the UK the government has decided to accept the recommendations of the Better Regulation Task Force to measure and make targeted reductions in the administrative costs - the red tape costs - that regulations impose on business. — John Hutton

Let's not allow the voice of the people to be overwhelmed by the siren song of those who opposed regulation, who demanded that government should stand aside and let finance and business run the show. — David Blunkett

Road testing the effects of regulation on European business must become second nature to the European Union. — John Hutton

The crash did not cause the Depression: that was part of a far broader malaise. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s - poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient regulations, the economy's dependence on new consumer goods, the over-extension of industry and the Government's blind belief that promoting business interests would make America uniformly prosperous. — Lucy Moore

The illustrious and noble ought to place before them certain rules and regulations, not less for their hours of leisure and relaxation than for those of business. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ... ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined ... with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men ... who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public — Adam Smith

America used to be a uniquely productive, low-cost place to do business. We had efficient infrastructure. We had limited regulation. We believed in the market. — Michael Porter

It is the censor's business to make a judgment about the propriety of the content or message of the proposed expressive activity. The regulation here does not authorize any judgment about the content of any speeches ... A park is a limited space, and to allow unregulated access to all comers could easily reduce rather than enlarge the park's utility as a forum for speech. Just imagine two rallies held at the same time in the same park area using public-address systems that drowned out each other's speakers. — Richard Posner

I think the knowledge about how legislation really affects small businesses is extremely valuable. If you haven't run a small business, then you don't have this kind of knowledge about how a regulation passed or taxes increased affects your bottom line. If you recognize that every new regulation takes that much more time to comply with, requires that many more employees, then it really gives you that foundational basis to make those decisions. — Kristi Noem