Zero-based regulation made Idaho the least regulated state in the US | Hacker News Reader

Zero-based regulation made Idaho the least regulated state in the US

manhattan.institute

16 pointsrtrx13 comments

I do believe they are regulating pregnancies in Idaho now, so that title is a little inaccurate.

My gob is smacked by the overt mercenary cynicism here. They don‘t even pretend to care about possible negative consequences - in fact they don’t even really care about the positive consequences! This is a document written by and for ideological operatives. The “spring-cleaning” below seems to have very negative possible consequences, but the authors take a “credentials schmedentials” approach to considering such things:

  Representative Examples of Spring-Cleaning Edits

  Type of Spring-Cleaning Edit 
  Specific Regulation Example

  Reduce barriers to entry into a licensed profession 
  Added an apprenticeship pathway for water-operator licenses in lieu of formal college education

  Ease burden of licensure renewal 
  Reduced continuing education requirements for professions like nursing and plumbing

  Expand professional scope of practice 
  Enabled occupational therapists to perform some duties previously limited to physical therapists; expanded pharmacist prescriptive authority

  Empower business ownership 
  Removed the requirement that a plumber have two years of journeyman experience to own his own business

  Limit supervision requirements on a licensed profession 
  Removed the limit on the number of physician assistants that may be overseen by a physician; expanded the duties that may be delegated to a dental assistant

  Expand consumer choice 
  Eliminated the prohibition on selling alcoholic beverages at college sporting events; removed barriers to telehealth, enabling broader access to health-care services and access to specialists

  Liberate academic institutions 
  Removed the requirement for the board of nursing to review and approve curriculum of nursing programs and deferred to existing accreditation pathways

The “occupational therapists and physical therapists are basically the same thing” is going to ruin a lot of people’s knees. And I wonder how long it’ll take for Iowa to quietly reimpose “plumbers must have requisite experience to run their own business”

This is just literal propaganda output by a think tank.

How do you delineate essential regulations (eg. airline regulations, food safety) from useless ones (eg. parking minimums, house zoning)?

Yeah, last I heard Idaho still has traffic signs and signals. Commit to the bit, Idaho!

In the minds of highly conservative lobbyist groups, like MI, there are no essential regulations.

Not sure how applicable Idaho's situation is to other states, because Idaho is one of the poorest states in the country.[a]

My quick take: Laws and regulations can be bad or even terrible... but sometimes they are good and necessary. For example, federal and state governments legally requiring everyone in the US to drive on the right side of the road has been beneficial for everyone.

What is almost always bad for everyone is the network of bureaucracies that grow and fester unchecked around the enactment and enforcement of laws and regulations.

We must distinguish between the two: laws/regulations vs. bureaucracies.

---

[a] #46 in GDP per capita, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Manhattan Institute appears to be quite biased: https://centerjd.org/content/fact-sheet-manhattan-institute

They generally hold views that are a bit off kilter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Poli...

There is surprisingly little info about Idaho and this policy, outside of think tank posts and reposts of their info.

This seems weird.

From the comments people are seriously confused about the article.

1. Regulations as mentioned in the article are only regulations enforced by executive agencies.

2. The essential benefit of a given regulation is the result of a cost benefit analysis the respective enforcing agency must produce every 5 years.

3. Regulations not deemed economically qualified according to the prior point can be eliminated by the governor.

This seems to be operating from the premise that being the least regulated state is inherently good. I'm skeptical of this claim while acknowledging there are many poor regulations. The regulatory slash and burn they describe seems as likely to remove useful regulations that, gasp, make the state better than oppressive ones that make it worse.

The incentive structure that they're using makes it much more likely that a good regulation will be kept than a bad one; this isn't a blanket destruction of all regulation, rather a review process that requires agencies to periodically affirm that a regulation is still having positive impact.

Or that it is aligned with the current executive’s philosophy. This is pretty likely to create regulatory instability, but the article (as much of it that I could read) didn’t address that.

One person's regulation is another's protection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com