Overregulated Arizona

In a recent piece, Arizona Republic columnist Robert Robb details the impositions inflicted by Arizona's legislature upon the suffering citizens of this state.

This last session, there were 296 laws enacted. Few of them were consequential. The overwhelming majority involved some minor tweak to the Tedious State. ...

The Tedious State really likes to tell us how to do our jobs. To renew a hearing aid dispenser license now will require 12 hours of continuing education, rather than the dangerously low previous requirement of only eight. I'm sure you're glad to hear that.

Unlicensed contractors, or those who aid or abet them, will be ineligible for probation until all sales taxes due for the job are paid. I understand that government has to get its. But, in most cases, won't the cost of incarceration quickly exceed the amount in arrears?

Nurse practitioners will get to do more, but those who sell insurance at self-service storage facilities will have to be licensed.

It wasn't all bad news.

In some cases, the grip of the Tedious State was relaxed a bit, but this serves mainly to illustrate how intrusive it has become. Motorcycles can now be driven in HOV lanes and optometrists were given greater authority to prescribe antihistamines. The lending authority of banks was expanded a little and credit unions were permitted to charge prepayment penalties on business loans. Internet estimations of home values were put beyond the regulatory clutches of the Board of Appraisal.

This three-steps-forward, one-back movement toward control-freakery has has been my experience of Arizona, too. Every year there are a few more rules and regulations, only partially counterbalanced by the repeal or softening of some silly restrictions that sufficiently ticked off enough people to get legislators' attention. Building codes and "general plans" are a good example. Not too many years ago, you could build what you pleased on your own land in Yavapai County; now you're subject to a host of restrictions and requirements, as well as a long-term scheme for how the county "should" be developed--at least, according to the fever dreams of the current crop of elected and appointed parasites.

But the Grand Canyon State is still far freer than the East Coast people's republics in which I was raised. That's not just because we still have less red tape ensnaring us than our eastern cousins. It's also because many of the residents turn a cheerfully blind eye to so many laws, and to their neighbors' defiance of those laws. I and my neighbors build, burn, remodel and run businesses with little concern for the wishes of state and county busybodies. The only other place I've seen such cheerful disregard for the law was in New York City, a jurisdiction so overburdened with regulations that only a masochist with plenty of free time would consider submitting to many of them.

Occasionally, though, the people become part of the problem. At the polls, last year, Arizonans voted to penalize anybody willing to work for a lower wage than popular opinion thought appropriate. They also joined in the national xenophobic fervor and passed new restrictions on immigrants at the ballot box. That electoral tantrum then prompted the legislature and governor to join in the anti-immigrant fun.

Overall, then, Arizona--like the U.S. as a whole--seems destined to become less free as the years go by. The saving grace, if there is one, will be the extent to which Arizonans will willfully defy the laws they and their supposed representatives put into place.

I sincerely hope that I continue to enjoy the company of cheerful scofflaws.