Analyst's note:  Just when you thought you'd heard it all, then comes along this report.  To slow this down, perhaps we must demand that Congress walk to Washington to work. Just to make it fair for all, lets say all must depart from Indianapolis, Indiana (the cross-roads of America). We've all heard the term, "taxed to death", read on and find out why it is true here in America .  This is especially under "progressives."

Among the findings in the report: On a per-household basis, federal regulatory costs average $14,974, which is more than the typical household spends on just about anything else. When regulatory costs are combined with federal spending, Washington's share of the economy rises to an eye-popping 31%.

For just one example, we note that EPA Regulations Set To Increase Natural Gas Prices By 150 Percent and Senators call proposed EPA rule a ‘terrifying power grab’.  For the "cherry on top" the Obama White House Wants to Turn All U.S. Interstates Into Toll Roads.  Throughout America, this nightmare scenario is already raising concerns.

“Tolling has proven to be an inefficient mechanism for collecting transportation revenue, consuming up to 20 percent of revenue generated, and those paying the toll may not even see that road improved because the president’s plan would allow toll revenue to go to other projects in the state,” the spokesman for the Alliance for Toll-Free Interstates, Miles Morin, said. “The option for states to place tolls on existing interstate capacity has existed for 23 years and not a single state has used tolls in this way – not just because the idea is unpopular, but because it’s bad policy.”

[....] considering the Obama administration’s long history of top-down decisions which have only exacerbated both the loss of privacy rights and America’s economic decline, it comes as no surprise.

“If you bought it, a truck brought it,” states an old adage by the trucking industry, so expect to pay more for everything you buy while also giving up more of your privacy if interstate tolling is implemented.

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There are currently more than 3,000 rules in various stages of implementation at 63 federal agencies; 191 of the rules are "economically significant," which means that they will impose more than $100 million in annual compliance costs. Nearly 670 of these rules will affect small businesses.

Last year, regulators issued 3,659 rules. That's equal to one new rule every 2 1/2 hours of every day, or nearly two federal rules issued every business hour. In 2013, there were 51 regulatory rules written for each law passed, which the CEI says is a measure of how much power Congress has delegated to unelected regulators.

This "Unconstitutionality Index" — as the CEI calls it — averaged 34 under Obama, nearly twice the average rate during the George W. Bush years. The Obama administration has had 42% more "economically significant" rules in the pipeline, on average, each year than the Bush administration.

At the same time, Obama's regulators have let state and local governments increasingly off the hook, putting fewer regulations affecting them in the pipeline than during the Bush or Clinton years. The CEI report includes various recommendations for making regulatory costs more transparent and readily available to the public.

[....] Governments make laws and in the modern era these laws are increasingly buttressed by regulations, yet both laws and regulations are forecasts – imposed on society based on a legislative vision of necessary solutions. Again, it is free-market economics that explains why despite a torrent of legislative actions over decades throughout the West, living standards are dropping not rising.

Every law, every regulation, every forecast that is acted on within a context of government demands is what we call a price fix, mandating an action of some considerable expense to society and insisting that those actions are initiated. Yet it is accepted as a matter of course by both the media and academia that price fixing doesn't work.

[....] Laws fix prices in ways that cannot be predicted. So do regulations. If the costs are great – and growing bigger – while the utility of imposing legislative solutions is impractical, why do Western governments continue down this path? And why does mainstream media not scrutinize what is going on in greater detail?

Of course, we know the answer to that. Regulatory efficiency is a bedrock dominant social theme, one that the globalist elite depends upon to help it reach its internationalist goals. No regulation ... and government begins to shrink; and if government loses power, then it loses value as a critical tool of manipulation.

[....] But the larger perspective is surely discouraging. Society – certainly US society – cannot continue long down this path. A critical mass of economic distortion must be reached sooner rather than later. Rome took several centuries to die, but Roman businesses were afflicted by taxes and coin shaving, not a modern regulatory regime. It could be that the ongoing flood of regulations proves more destructive to the West than either fiscal or monetary policy.

Conclusion

Perhaps a case can be made for regulation, or at least minimal regulation, but what is occurring now is neither logical nor defensible. The modern epidemic of regulation combined with taxation and monetary inflation (along with court-imposed corporatism) are reasons why the ascent of the Western socioeconomic model has been evidently curtailed and why, sooner or later, the West is headed for a fall.