Of Concern 

There is never a shortage of gloom and doomers eager to point out how our country is going down the tubes and how our way of life will never be the same.   Not wanting to be lumped in with this crowd, it is with some trepidation that I write this article.  Although it may not seem so as you read this, please remember that I am an optimist.

The resiliency of free markets is our greatest strength, and I have faith that we will overcome these latest challenges as long as the powers that be don’t fiddle too much with those free markets.   It may be tempting to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs to get to the supply of eggs, but as every child learns that is a very foolish thing to do.

One of my concerns was raised when President Bush recently vetoed legislation that would have furthered stem cell research in this country.  If you haven’t followed this debate, stem cells come from our earliest stage of development, embryos, and can become virtually any part of your body.  Need a new liver?  It can be grown from a stem cell.  Medically this has huge potential for us all.  Pitted against the medical community are groups who are ethically opposed to the use of embryonic cells for anything other than growing babies.   Both sides make many good points, and President Bush, in a move calculated to appeal to his conservative base, sided with the ethicists and against the medical researchers in his veto.

Regardless of which side you are on, the reality is that stem cell research will go on no matter what laws we pass.  If it can’t happen here, it will be done somewhere else.  This is a truly global economy, remember.  There are free market forces at work all over the world and this is simply too big of an issue to be ignored. Vast amounts of money will be made and the race is on.  To think we can legislate this away is short sighted.

To underline this point, within days of the President’s veto of stem cell legislation, Great Britain announced multi-billion dollar funding for stem cell research.  What this means to you and me is in 10 or 20 years when we need a  new body part, instead if buying it from a US biotech company we will be buying it from a British company, and our standard of living slips one more notch in the process as more of our money goes overseas.
Another golden goose we are killing is in the area of renewable energy.

China now has rules that any new factory must be fueled by renewable energy resources; solar, wind, fuel cells, etc.  Not surprisingly, these devices must also be manufactured in China.  China has decided to become the leader in renewable energy, and their own industrial base will become their launch pad.

China has a command economy, and these autocratic systems can be very efficient.  There is no wasting time on pesky political debates or environmental impact statements.  Just get the job done now!  Eventually a command economy will succumb to market forces as we saw in the struggles of Japan in the 1990’s after 40 years of incredible economic growth.  But one can lose a lot of ground to a rival in 40 years, and that is what I foresee happening in alternative energy.
Because the US has done next to nothing to promote research into alternative energy, and the Chinese are being forced into it, what this means to you and me is that in 10-20 years when you want to install solar because the cost of oil is so high, you may be buying it from a Chinese company who perfected the technology while we were fiddling away the time.  And our standard of living slips yet another notch as more money goes overseas.

Another golden goose is our preeminence in the financial arena.  Wall Street has long been the financial capitol (pun intended) of the world.  But recent legislation threatens to end this, also.
It is a thin line that separates insufficient regulation and over regulation.  The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was put into law in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom accounting scandals, supposedly to force big business to clean up their act.  However, the Enron and Worldcom executives that have been sent to jail were convicted under existing laws. SOX would have accomplished nothing that the existing laws could not.  The existing laws worked just fine.  Slowly, perhaps, but they worked.

Incidentally the only real prosecution under the SOX statute so far was against Richard Scrushy of Health-South, and it failed in securing any convictions.
So, do you feel safer?   You should, feel safer considering the many billions US companies are being forced to spend to comply with SOX.

What really concerns me is the huge drain on the resources of US companies due to the inefficient and ineffective Sarbanes Oxley Act.  These SOX billions could be used to provide more American jobs, but, Nooooooo.  We have to throw it away to comply with useless regulation.
Perhaps I’m being too harsh.  After all, there are jobs being created for regulators and accountants.  Not exactly the productive jobs than can raise our collective standard of living, but at least they are going to Americans.

Mike Glasior in a recent column, reports:  “The exodus of foreign companies being listed on U.S. securities markets has already begun in a robust way because any company listed on these markets will be required to comply with the onerous SOX requirements.  The legislation has already made non-U.S. markets more attractive to foreign companies and unfortunately it goes deeper than that.

Unless Congress acts to stop this unfortunate exportation of a lousy law, it is reasonable to assume that the U.S. will only become a less and less desirable destination for large companies to do business.  Jog your own memory here, and consider every large merger in recent history that involved a U.S. and a non-U.S. company.  Ask yourself why it almost never comes to pass that the combined entity ends up being an American company (read Chrysler/Daimler Benz, Bankers Trust/Deutsche Bank, et al) and you'll quickly realize that nobody wants to operate within the U.S. regulatory climate if they can avoid it.  The list of merged companies grows pretty darn fast the longer you think about it, too.

And our standard of living takes one more hit.   Thank you, Congress, for this gem.