Free To Choose: a personal Statement

Who Protects the Consumer?
191
the Federal Register, from 17,660 in 1970 to 36,487 in 1978,
taking 127 inches of shelf space—a veritable ten-foot shelf.
During the same decade, economic growth in the United States
slowed drastically. From 1949 to 1969, output per man-hour of
all persons employed in private business—a simple and compre-
hensive measure of productivity—rose more than 3 percent a
year; in the next decade, less than half as fast; and by the end of
the decade productivity was actually declining.
Why link these two developments? One has to do with assuring
our safety, protecting our health, preserving clean air and water;
the other, with how effectively we organize our economy. Why
should these two good things conflict?
The answer is that whatever the announced objectives, all of
the movements in the past two decades—the consumer movement,
the ecology movement, the back-to-the-land movement, the hippie
movement, the organic-food movement, the protect-the-wilderness
movement, the zero-population-growth movement, the "small is
beautiful" movement, the antinuclear movement—have had one
thing in common. All have been antigrowth. They have been
opposed to new developments, to industrial innovation, to the
increased use of natural resources. Agencies established in re-
sponse to these movements have imposed heavy costs on industry
after industry to meet increasingly detailed and extensive govern-
ment requirements. They have prevented some products from
being produced or sold; they have required capital to be invested
for nonproductive purposes in ways specified by government
bureaucrats.
The results have been far-reaching and threaten to be even
more so. As Edward Teller, the great nuclear physicist, once put
it, "It took us eighteen months to build the first nuclear power
generator; it now takes twelve years; that's progress." The direct
cost of regulation to the taxpayer is the least part of its total cost.
The $5 billion a year spent by the government is swamped by the
costs to industry and consumer of complying with the regulations.
Conservative estimates put that cost at something like $100 bil-
lion a year. And that doesn't count the cost to the consumer of
restricted choice and higher prices for the products that are
available.

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192
FREE TO CHOOSE: A Personal Statement
This revolution in the role of government has been accom-
panied, and largely produced, by an achievement in public per-
suasion that must have few rivals. Ask yourself what products are
currently least satisfactory and have shown the least improvement
over time. Postal service, elementary and secondary schooling,
railroad passenger transport would surely be high on the list.
Ask yourself which products are most satisfactory and have im-
proved the most. Household appliances, television and radio sets,
hi-fi equipment, computers, and, we would add, supermarkets
and shopping centers would surely come high on that list.
The shoddy products are all produced by government or gov-
ernment-regulated industries. The outstanding products are all
produced by private enterprise with little or no government in-
volvement. Yet the public—or a large part of it—has been per-
suaded that private enterprises produce shoddy products, that we
need ever vigilant government employees to keep business from
foisting off unsafe, meretricious products at outrageous prices on
ignorant, unsuspecting, vulnerable customers. That public rela-
tions campaign has succeeded so well that we are in the process
of turning over to the kind of people who bring us our postal
service the far more critical task of producing and distributing
energy.
Ralph Nader's attack on the Corvair, the most dramatic single
episode in the campaign to discredit the products of private in-
dustry, exemplifies not only the effectiveness of that campaign
but also how misleading it has been. Some ten years after Nader
castigated the Corvair as unsafe at any speed, one of the agencies
that was set up in response to the subsequent public outcry finally
got around to testing the Corvair that started the whole thing.
They spent a year and a half comparing the performance of the
Corvair with the performance of other comparable vehicles, and
they concluded, "The 1960–63 Corvair compared favorably with
the other contemporary vehicles used in the tests." ' Nowadays
Corvair fan clubs exist throughout the country. Corvairs have
become collectors' items. But to most people, even the well in-
formed, the Corvair is still "unsafe at any speed."
The railroad industry and the automobile industry offer an
excellent illustration of the difference between a governmentally

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