What We Can Learn From Britain's Exit

The morning after Great Britain’s June 23 Brexit referendum, former London mayor Boris Johnson said that British voters “decided that it is time to take back control from a European Union that has become too remote, too opaque, and not accountable enough to the people it is meant to serve.”

Sound familiar?

The same could be said about Washington, D.C.’s distant, stealthy, impervious bureaucracy. Just as Britain Brexited Brussels, America should Amerexit the Beltway.

Brussels repelled Britons, in part, by relentlessly pelting them with expensive, pointless regulations surreal enough to make a Magritte resemble a Gainsborough.

Perhaps most notoriously, Brussels requires that all bananas in the EU must be “free from malformation or abnormal curvature.” And how does one define “abnormal?”

Please consult EU Commission Regulation 1333/2011.

Achieving a nearly erotic level of absurdity, this rule stretches to 4,465 words.

Consider these other outrages, courtesy of the pro-Brexit campaign, Vote Leave:

• The EU forced the United Kingdom to impose a value-added tax when it joined in 1973. Brussels mandates that British consumers pay a VAT of at least 5 percent on numerous goods, including tampons and condoms. But Brussels does not solely target intimate products. According to Vote Leave, “the European Commission referred the Dutch government to the European Court of Justice for allowing exemptions on boat moorings” on which Holland hoped to reduce VAT. 

• The European Food Safety Authority made it “illegal to say that drinking water stops dehydration.”

• Brussels’ Habitats Directive, London conceded, prevents contractors from “building the homes that Britain needs.”

• A new EU rule would force restaurants to replace refillable table-top olive oil bottles with individual, tamper-proof containers.

• In a brilliant scene from "Brexit: The Movie," an Englishman wakes up and prepares for work. His household products yield to a staggering spectrum of EU commands. His alarm clock is affected by 11 such orders. Toothpaste, 47. His showerhead, 91. Shampoo, 118. And the oversight accelerates as he eats breakfast. His orange juice is squeezed by 202 edicts. Coffee, 625. Bread, 1,246. And milk traverses a mind-blowing 12,653 different regulations between the cow’s udders and the Briton’s lips.

The House of Commons Library estimates that 60 percent of British laws began as EU directives. Brussels costs Britain roughly $45 billion annually — or a population-adjusted $225 billion here.

Of course, we’ve seen this movie, too. America also suffers from hyperactive bureaucratic micro-mismanagement.

Some regulations make sense. Most libertarians could accept the Labor Department’s new “Rules regarding confined spaces in construction: preventing suffocation and explosions.”

But much else is bonkers, as Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Clyde Wayne Crews details in "Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State."

• The Energy Department is fussing with dehumidifiers, vending machines, wine chillers, pool heaters, and ice makers.

• The Health and Human Services Department is readying “portion-size regulations for products such as breath mints.”

• The EPA is waging a new War on Wood-burning Stoves.

• Another rule fights dust on farms. Why not ban sand from beaches?

• Unlike most regulations, which usually involve advance notice and public comment, the Obama dictatorship now suddenly issues “guidance letters.” These decrees have the force of law. Such “guidance” now limits auto dealers’ freedom to offer customers discounted car loans. This is how the Labor Department redefined many independent contractors as employees. Education Department “guidance” helps persecute innocent college men for acts of sexual harassment that they never committed. “Guidance” recently brought the transgender wars into local school bathrooms and locker rooms across America.

Last year’s 80,260 pages in the Federal Register will wind up in the "Code of Federal Regulations," which spans 237 bound volumes. Crews estimates the annual cost of federal red tape at $1.9 trillion or roughly 10 percent of GDP.

This country sorely needs an Amerexit from all of this. How?

Come November, elect candidates who explicitly promise to lasso these faceless, mindless geniuses before they leave us all cold and hungry outside the poor house.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a contributing editor with National Review Online. He is also a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. Read more reports from Deroy Murdock — Click Here Now.