In this chapter we have described how federal regulation of business has expanded over time. There have been ups and downs in the trend of regulations, but the basic direction has been up, with respect to both total volume and complexity. Successive efforts of presidents during the past 50 years have not succeeded in slowing the expansion despite the fact that some of them ran their campaigns on the promise that, if elected, they would reduce the size of government. J. M. Clark, one of the great economists of the twentieth century, astutely observed in 1932:

The frontiers of control . . . are expanding . . . they are expanding in the range of things covered and the minuteness of regulation. . . . Whether one believes government control to be desirable or undesirable, it appears fairly obvious that the increasing interdependence of all parts of the economic system . . . will force more control in the future than has been attempted in normal times in the past.³⁸

As we have seen, the cost of federal regulations is huge, but the cost is offset in significant degree by the many benefits of regulation to society as a whole, individuals, companies, and industries. Analysis of both costs and benefits suggests that costs can be reduced and benefits increased by reforms in the regulatory system. That is the subject of the next chapter.

³⁸ J. M. Clark, “Government Regulation of Industry,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 3 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), p. 129.