Bureaucrats Replaced Capitalists in the Land of the Free

It is a comforting myth that the American economy is governed by markets. It flatters the national identity, this idea of a commercial republic where individuals exchange goods freely, entrepreneurs compete fairly, and capital finds its most productive use. But for anyone who has ever attempted to start a business, take a company public, or operate a local bank, this myth quickly dissolves into bureaucratic reality. The modern American economy is no longer regulated by the invisible hand. It is micromanaged by the visible clipboard, wielded by unelected clerks with agency titles, armed with rulebooks, and increasingly, political agendas.

Consider the banking sector. A century ago, the US had over 28,000 banks. Most were small, local institutions rooted in their communities. They provided the capital that built farms, shops, and homes across America. Today, there are fewer than 4,500 banks, a 85 percent decline. This did not occur through some natural consolidation or shift in consumer preferences. It happened because the regulatory state strangled the small bank.

Each wave of financial regulation, from the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 to the post-2008 Dodd-Frank Act, layered new costs, new reporting requirements, and new compliance mandates onto institutions. Large banks absorbed these costs with in-house legal departments and billion-dollar compliance budgets. Small banks could not. So they sold, merged, or shuttered. What remains today is an oligopoly of financial giants, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, each of which is now effectively "too big to fail." As a result they are insulated from real accountability, even when they violate the very rules that helped put their smaller competitors out of business. The regulatory framework rewards scale over service, consolidation over competition, and impunity over integrity.

This is not a story of better safety. It is a story of displaced risk. Small banks were more responsive to local conditions and more accountable to their communities. Their extinction has not reduced systemic financial threats. It has merely centralized them.

Public companies have not fared much better. In the late 1990s, there were nearly 8,000 US-listed public firms. Today, there are about 4,000. This collapse is not because Americans have grown less entrepreneurial. It is because going public has become a legal and regulatory gauntlet. Sarbanes-Oxley, passed in the wake of the Enron scandal, effectively deputized CEOs as compliance officers, responsible for the entirety of their company’s financial reporting. The paperwork alone runs to thousands of pages. The cost of compliance can run into the millions.

Then came ESG. Under the guise of environmental stewardship and social responsibility, companies are now graded on a set of ideological metrics unrelated to profitability or product quality. They must disclose their carbon footprints, publish diversity audits, and demonstrate equity strategies. This is not transparency. It is a political loyalty test. It has nothing to do with shareholder value and everything to do with cultural conformity. It also deters new entrants. Startups looking to grow must now plan not just for customers and capital, but for compliance with a soft but totalizing bureaucratic regime.

The irony is rich. The administrative state, born in the Progressive Era as a means of disciplining industrial monopolies, now operates as a cartel enforcement agency. It rewards those who can afford the rules and punishes those who cannot. Amazon can hire DEI consultants. BlackRock can print ESG reports. The local toolmaker in Ohio or the biotech firm in Florida? Not so much.

This is not capitalism. It is cartelism, administered by regulation. And it is enforced not through law, but through a sprawling ecosystem of agencies and sub-agencies. Today, there are more than 430 federal departments, agencies, and commissions. Many are unknown to the public. Some operate with rulemaking powers that exceed those of Congress. The Federal Register, which logs every federal rule and proposed rule, now exceeds 180,000 pages. No one can read it. That is its function. Its unreadability cloaks its authority.

Thomas Jefferson once warned, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." What he could not have foreseen is that government would yield not to kings or armies, but to career bureaucrats and regulatory NGOs. Nor could he have imagined that economic liberty would die not with a bang, but under the weight of cumulative paperwork.

Defenders of this regime argue that regulation protects the consumer. But what protects the consumer from the regulator? From the costs passed down as higher prices? From the diminished innovation that results when firms divert money from R&D to compliance? From the labor market distortions that arise when entrepreneurs cannot afford to hire due to legal ambiguity?

There is also a democratic cost. Regulatory bodies operate with opacity. They are staffed by lifers who outlast administrations. And increasingly, they act with ideological rather than empirical mandates. The SEC has floated rules to require companies to disclose their climate risks, regardless of relevance. The Department of Labor has proposed standards that privilege ESG in retirement fund selection, ignoring fiduciary duty. These are not neutral rules. They are policy preferences, made durable by being removed from electoral accountability. And while President Trump and the DOGE team are actively working to rein in the power of these regulatory bodies, the courts are working overtime to block those efforts. Judicial activism, particularly from the administrative law bench, has become the last line of defense for a bloated regulatory state that knows it cannot win at the ballot box. The result is a bureaucracy insulated by both procedure and precedent.

What results is a bifurcated economy. At one end, you have the consolidated and the compliant, large corporations, public-private partnerships, and global firms with legal departments to spare. At the other end, you have the stagnant and the stifled, small businesses, family firms, and would-be entrepreneurs strangled in their crib by a licensing office or a disclosure requirement.

This regime is not sustainable. Nor is it American in any meaningful constitutional sense. A republic cannot survive when its economic liberty is subject to the whims of a bureaucratic aristocracy. It cannot thrive when ambition must first be cleared by the Department of Paperwork and Process. It cannot innovate when creativity is measured by how well one performs in the ESG Olympics.

What we need is not deregulation, but a regulatory reset. That means requiring cost-benefit analyses for every agency rule every five years. It means imposing sunset clauses on every new regulation. It means capping the total volume of rules any agency can issue. It means consolidating agencies, abolishing redundant ones, and reasserting congressional authority over the bureaucratic state. And most of all, it means reviving a national ethic that honors risk-takers over rule-writers, builders over administrators.

A truly free economy is not one in which every action is permitted so long as it conforms to a 300-page compliance document. It is one in which the rules are few, clear, and known in advance. It is one where the entrepreneur is presumed competent unless proven otherwise, not presumed guilty until paperwork says otherwise.

This is not a call for anarchy. It is a call for sanity. It is not a rejection of rules, but of rule-by-clerk. It is not nostalgia for laissez-faire, but realism about bureaucratic entropy. The American experiment was premised on liberty under law. Today, we suffer under law without liberty.

If we are to preserve the former, we must dismantle the latter.

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