Sometimes my trolls don’t “grok“** the concept of irony. You know who you are, and you aren’t worth mentioning here.

That said, I inject another form of irony as I submit a selection for your consideration from the UK’s left-leaning The Economist magazine — to which I’ve subscribed for a number of years.

Here, from The Heritage Foundation’s The Foundry, America’s current business state is summed up in that UK magazine:

The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation.… The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.

Faint praise and high damning from a nation known, now, as the Poster Child for superfluous regulatory and — as admitted by the author — meddling bullshit.

I find this highlights a rather large portion of Extra Crispy Irony, considering the UK’s current status as EU Regulatory Queen.

As Anthony Kim writes in the Heritage article:

Indeed, this unfortunate drifting away from “free to choose” has been the prime culprit in America’s startling decline in economic freedom and overall competitiveness. Worse, the trend of over-regulating our economy, coupled with bloated government spending, has bred cronyism and corrupted our free market system. Each new edict means a new government bureaucracy that individuals and businesses must navigate. Each new law opens the door for political graft.

Given the deteriorating regulatory and institutional environment, it is not surprising that our economic recovery process has been so disappointingly un-dynamic and has yielded such unimpressive job creation. The latest Gallup survey, released on February 15, highlights the problem: “Health Costs, Gov’t Regulations Curb Small Business Hiring: Nearly half of small-business owners name these issues.”

Let me write what, apparently, few others seem to sense or realize in terms of our national US economic “recovery.” And that is this:

• There will NOT be a full recovery, or anything really resembling that, until the issue of ObakaKare is resolved — meaning, that ObakaKare is well and truly killed, unfunded or cast aside.
• There will NOT be a full recovery, or anything really resembling that, until the issue of CapNTax is resolved.
• And there will NOT be a full recovery until businesses large and small think that there is someone sitting in the Oval Office who believes that free market Capitalism beats government micromanagement hands-down.

Let me be clear: those assurances will NOT occur under the current president, which is why a second term with Mr Obama will end up driving this country down like the unrelenting, uncorrectable course of Flight 11.

– When the United Kingdom proffers that the US is over-regulated — ?

Then there are either flying monkeys, or there is truth.

And I don’t see any flying monkeys.

BZ

** Read Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger In A Strange Land.”