A candidate for the most meaningless/wrong political rhetoric

"Regulations like this are killing business, making us uncompetitive in the world market and killing jobs."

We all hear this constantly in current political rhetoric, but it is also one of the most overused and durable political glittering generalities in our history.  I suspect you can pick up almost any copy of the Congressional Record for the last 100 years, find discussion addressing legislation attempting to regulate business conduct and within a few pages find some member of Congress espousing some version of the above statement.  (A statement in the 1931 Congressional Record sparked this blog).

Yet somehow, despite the constant lamenting of the Congressional defenders of all things business we managed over the last 100 years to build the most dynamic and dominant economy in the world, and enjoy the most comfortable and secure lifestyle in the history of the world.  (Although admittedly our position has slipped somewhat since those same Republicans who most commonly espouse this cliche got a majorities in Congress from 1995 to 2007 and managed to undermine the economic stability of much of the developed world)

I've heard thousands of politicians making statements like this in my lifetime, but never really thought about how they have been contradicted by history until recently.  I was reading the Congressional Record about a Republican bill in 1995-96 to gut the Truth in Savings Act.  The Truth in Savings Act (12 USC 4301 et seq) had been enacted by a Democratic Congress in 1991 in response to widespread consumer complaints following the Savings and Loan debacle of the 1980's that banks and other savings institutions were using misleading or false information about how much interest a saver would get if they deposited their money with that institution.  Sure enough the above phrase came up regularly in the discussions of the Truth in Savings Act.  If I picked out the words and quoted it here and attributed to almost any current Republican as something they said today, no one would doubt it was a current statement for a second.

One of the primary lubricants that makes free markets work is honesty, allowing dishonesty into the market is like throwing sand into the ball bearings on a wheel.  The Truth in Savings Act set up rules to make sure that institutions were honest about how much interest a consumer could expect if they put their money in that institution.  Yet here, before the Truth in Saving's Act was even dry behind the ears, Republicans were out to gut it to protect financial institutions from having to provide some evidence they were being truthful about the interest they were paying.  Luckily, between Democratic opposition, and Republicans hearing from lots of consumers about how they had been ripped off, in the end the Act only had its teeth pulled, it wasn't deleted.  Oddly enough, given Republicans constant denigration of regulators and regulation, the part that got eliminated was the part that allowed the people injured by the misrepresentation to sue for damages.  The regulatory scheme remained in place.

This is not to say regulations can't be needlessly burdensome, or outdated or counterproductive. But this tired cliche usually serves as an substitute for thought about how to balance the legitimate need for regulation against the potential for over regulation.   My eyes glaze over and my opinion of a speaker sinks anytime I hear someone falling back on this poor excuse for political dialogue.