Idaho Embarks on Enormous Deregulation Experiment

If this is the post of the day, look to the right and see the graphic of the sunset with my message to Deregulate.  (If it's not the post of the day, look at the top of the right sidebar). 

1. Sunset all new laws.  That means all new Federal Laws get an expiration date.  
2. Throw out all useless old laws. Like how the Trump administration has thrown out 22 regulations for every new one they've added 

According to The Library of Economics and Liberty, and quoting from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Idaho has just thrown out all of their existing regulations.  All.  Admittedly, it wasn't planned and nobody seems to know quite what it means, but let me just quote from the article.

Something rather remarkable just happened in Idaho. The state legislature opted to—in essence—repeal the entire state regulatory code. The cause may have been dysfunction across legislative chambers, but the result is serendipitous. A new governor is presented with an unprecedented opportunity to repeal an outdated and burdensome regulatory code and replace it with a more streamlined and sensible set of rules. Other states should be paying close attention.

Instead, the legislature wrapped up an acrimonious session in April without passing a rule-reauthorization bill. As a result, come July 1, some 8,200 pages of regulations containing 736 chapters of state rules will expire. Any rules the governor opts to keep will have to be implemented as emergency regulations, and the legislature will consider them anew when it returns next January.

What does this mean?  Do STOP signs cease to be valid?  Is the state going to be overrun by inadequately licensed hair dressers or fingernail technicians, or some other specialty regulated into a tiny box by an established group of practitioners keeping newcomers out?  The authors of the articles say they don't know.

You might have come across the idea of a “regulatory reset.”  It would be like this, except deliberately crafted rather than the result of legislative dysfunction.  The idea is that the government eliminates all regulations and then brings back the ones it decides it wants.  Presumably, we would end up with substantially fewer regulations.  In practice, when deregulation is tried, regulatory agencies (think FCC, FDA, HEW, EPA and the alphabet soup of Fed.gov executive branch agencies) are reluctant to throw out sunsetted regulations.  It threatens their existence!  To borrow a quote from the Mercatus Center article:

The Idaho case also highlights the power of sunset provisions—or automatic expiration dates built into laws or regulations. In the past, academic research has found that sunset provisions are sometimes ineffective. Legislatures and agencies often readopt regulations without much thought.  To work well, sunsets may need to be structured such that large swaths of rules expire simultaneously, with reauthorization responsibilities falling to the legislature rather than regulators. Sunsets are perhaps most useful when rules are allowed to lapse and then forced back through the rulemaking process all over again. That way they can be subjected to public scrutiny, cost-benefit analysis, and perhaps even court challenges.  [Bold added: SiG]

The regulatory state hates this idea.  If the legislature is debating putting old rules back they're not working on new regulations.  I think that's a feature, not a bug.

It goes without saying that being in central Florida I'm just about as far from Idaho as one can get in the continental US and still be in the CONUS.  I imagine some of you are from Idaho and might have more insight.  Comments from anyone familiar with the Idaho goings-on are appreciated.