It’s a question I see from “progressives” all the time; what harm does regulation do?

Via BigGov, we have an example right here in Saint Paul:

Verlin Stoll is a 27-year-old entrepreneurial dynamo who owns Crescent Tide funeral home in Saint Paul, Minn. Verlin has built a successful business because he offers low-cost funerals while providing high-quality service. His business is also one of the only funeral homes that benefits low-income families who cannot afford the high prices of the big funeral-home companies.

It’s not a “shovel-ready” job, but it’s a business.  One might think Minnesota’s DFL-strangled bureaucracy would appreciate another tax-paying business on the books.

Oh, no.

Verlin wants to expand his business, hire new employees and continue to offer the lowest prices in the Twin Cities, but Minnesota refuses to let Verlin build a second funeral home unless he builds a $30,000 embalming room that he will never use.

Why?

Minnesota’s law is irrational. Embalming is never required just because someone passes away and the state does not even require funeral homes to do their own embalming. In fact, it is perfectly legal to outsource embalming to a third-party embalmer. Minnesota’s largest funeral chain has 17 locations with 17 embalming rooms, but actually uses only one of those rooms.

In other words, state regulations force Stoll to build an embalming room even though state law doesn’t require anyone to be embalmed, or require him to do it in his own facility in any case.

But why?

So that the big, full-amenity funeral-home businesses can benefit from a law that drives up prices for consumers and operating expenses for competitors such as Verlin.

There you go.  Too many regulations not only pick winners and losers – they allow the winners to pick themselves.

The government should not force Minnesotans to do useless things. That is why on January 19, 2012, Verlin and the Institute for Justice challenged the law in state court.

The Minnesota Constitution protects every Minnesotan’s economic liberty, which means that it protects entrepreneurs from being burdened by legal requirements that are either useless or designed to suppress honest competition.

A victory here will not only free Verlin from an unconstitutional restraint on his economic liberty, but protect entrepreneurs across the state from pointless laws and bureaucracy.

And when you bring up stories like this, “progressives” will inevitably snivel “so you want to abolish the FDA and allow bakers to put sawdust in bread and allow child labor and let rats roam through preschools…”

Well, no.  We’re just wondering why we can’t have the government we need, and get rid of the parts we don’t?   To have the right amount of government.

Via Amy Alkon

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, January 20th, 2012 at 10:00 am and is filed under Progressive Tyranny, Socialism American Style. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.