Conde de Romanones
It is totally surprising how ideas such as regulations can attract large numbers of followers, specifically those people who are marginalized and dissatisfied with the way things are happening, those people who envy the blind. Regulations are not alien to any economic model, within the right there are also regulations, however, it is from the left where most are proposed with a radical sense.
What seems to be foreign to the system of thought of all these people who advocate regulations is that although the politician in office can promise how great and beneficial it would be to the country if things were regulated, the truth is that there are much worse and, above all, lasting consequences.
This deception is always rooted in the practice of populism, it is promised and intended to solve a problem through regulations, something that will never do because regulations are like narcotics the more they are used the more addictive they become, and, if you don't believe what I'm saying, you can ask an Argentine or a Venezuelan about it.
The main effects of this political placebo are two: 1) to interrupt any sense of already existing law at the whim of procedures that almost always end in nothing, which gives the politician a series of chain possibilities: the delay, the muddle, the use of absolutely impenetrable processing processes, a way of avoiding any liability in the end.
The 2) effect is even more pernicious, because it consists of establishing a series of controls and procedures that ultimately only serve to create difficulties to those whose condition was bad, on the contrary, additional advantages are offered to those who are part of the political system, also offers the possibility of absorbing these new costs to immediately endorse them to third parties who have thus managed to remove from the field of their competence.
The seriousness of this last aspect is that in many occasions, these effects are not perceptible at first sight, they take their time precisely to guarantee that everything remains not equal but a little better for those who control the situation. That the government imposes regulations in any area is the sure mechanism to guarantee a price increase without real improvement, the perfect mechanism for there to be a better distribution of wealth.
In reality, those who should fear regulations the most are the weakest, who are very often victims of the most puerile deception, to the extent that they think that if a government gets tough with companies and banks it will benefit them in some way, ignoring the decisive fact that the financial powers will manage, in one way or another, so that the most naive and defenseless end up paying out of their pockets for the interventionist and demagogic joys of the best-intentioned governments.
Growing regulation is the realm of uncontrolled arbitrariness, and this is not only the case in purely administrative and fiscal matters but, to the disgrace of immature democracies, in matters affecting political rights and citizen equality.
In Spain, the best possible example of this iniquity is the treatment that successive governments, supposedly pro bono pacis, have been paying to unfair political forces with the most basic and inalienable national interests.
It is necessary to think seriously about politics, about the law as a rule of the game that cannot be violated by regulations, it would be almost as much as leaving politicians without room for maneuver, because without taxpayers' money there can be no politics.
The only way to really respect the laws is to let them exercise their effects without jeopardizing their compliance with an infinity of regulations as perverse as they are absurd. Of course, the political culture that would make this ideal possible is strictly contrary to the principle of arbitrariness, to this way of understanding political representation and the legitimacy of the ballot box, as a kind of unlimited right to upset everything.
Unfortunately, we still cannot say the same about the myriad of arbitrariness, such as the curse of Diesel cars, the infamous and chaotic regulation of car rental services with driver, or the infinite and contradictory regulations that haunt us in any business.
Both the political delirium and all the nonsensical regulatory regimes are born from the same source, the oblivion that laws do not exist to give more power to those who have the honorable right and duty to represent and govern us but to limit it severely and for very good reasons.
