The High Cost of Government-Mandated Discrimination: DOMA and the Regulatory State

Conservatives frequently talk about the cost of regulations. For instance, Freedomworks, a well-known conservative organization, published a piece called The Hidden Cost of Regulation. It said: “Complying with regulations is not cheap,” noting that regulations aren’t paid for by just corporations, but by “the entire economy.” It notes that consumers pay higher prices as well, due to these regulations, and that they “act as a drag on economic growth.”

Allow me to add two other points Freedomworks did not mention, but which I believe they would agree with. 1) Motives of the regulators do not change costs imposed by the regulations. That is, costs are not lower if the motives of regulators are good. 2) Costs are not changed if regulations are imposed by one political party rather than the other. In other words, the cost of Republican-imposed regulations would be just the same if Democrats had been the guilty party.

With this in mind, let us turn to a set of regulations Republicans put into place, with the claimed motive of “protecting the family:” The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

The Tragedy of Urban Renewal

About six minutes.

The Stonewall Uprising

PBS has an excellent documentary on the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. What is often forgotten is that millions of gay people were regularly and horribly oppressed by the state. So-called sodomy laws were selectively enforced against blacks and gay people according to the biases of the police. What happened in 1969 was the police once agains raided a gay bar and started hassling, harassing and attacking patrons. This time patrons fought back, which had never happened before. As the police gathered outside to counterattack they found themselves surrounded by hundreds of other angry people who were also tired of how the State treated the LGBT community.

That night changed modern society because the patrons were joined by hundreds of others, then thousands. The gay liberation movement that was born grew to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions. While a gay rights movement later formed, the early gay liberation movement was essentially a libertarian uprising against big government. It was a defense of the individual against the state. Like abolitionism, and the civil rights movement, what started that night pushed forward the cause of liberty and all libertarians ought to applaud it. The following video is about 90 minutes.

. See more American Experience.

Give me a call, and why you can afford to do it.

I witnessed the telephonics revolution and lived to tell about it. I can go back to the time that there was Bell Telephone, and in the other corner, Bell Telephone. I even remember the standard black, rotary dial phone. That was what they called choice back then.

Bell had a monopoly because the government said that competition would be bad for us. Bell of course agreed. In return the government said it had to control Bell's profits. Bell profited and consumers had no choice.

Then there was a dramatic development in the telephone industry. Bell decided that we could have a new kind of phone, the "sleek" Princess phone. They promised that it was little, lovely and it lights up! Better yet it came in some colors other than black. That was a revolution by the standards of the regulated Bell Telephone.

It took another four years before the next great innovation came along—touchtone dialing. And then it was another 15 years before they came up with the idea of phone jacks where the phones just plugged in and worked. To say the least, change came at a glacial pace, there was little innovation and costs remained high compared to the average income.