Living in California, as Schumpeter does, you would think licence plates called it the Red Tape State, not the golden one. Last August it led the world in announcing a ban on new gasoline-fuelled cars by 2035. In December its single market of America is threatened by its culture wars.”>petrol prices soared higher than anywhere else in America, leading to an onerous cap on refiners’ profit margins. Early this year you could barely find an egg to fry, partly because of an animal-welfare measure from 2018 that keeps eggs off its shop shelves if they are laid in cages.
California has the privilege of being a colossal market irresistible to manufacturers, so some of its rules become standards well beyond its borders. But it is not unique in wanting to go its own way. Across America, a mishmash of regulations from state to state differ on everything from how to manufacture lifts and how to produce liquor to how to run a bank. In theory that is all well and good. Regulatory experimentation can be healthy. In practice it creates a minefield. Every American state border is festooned with so much red tape that it costs businesses an arm and a leg.
For a columnist from Britain, this is strange. Having grown so accustomed to hearing about the shortcomings of the European Union’s single market, it is a shock to realise that America’s interstate equivalent is no paradise, despite being bigger, constitutionally protected and far more rooted in history than the EU’s.
2023-05-18 07:47:35
Article from www.economist.com