From Phil Gramm and Mike Salon a The Wall Street Journal, The Stagflation is Coming:

In imposing ObamaCare, government increasingly dominated the healthcare industry, the green energy agenda hit auto producers and power plants and stifled the domestic energy industry with regulatory actions such as blocking the Keystone pipeline. Large banks were regulated as if they were public utilities, forcing them to replace tellers and loan officers with lawyers and compliance officers. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) investigated and harassed mortgage companies, as well as auto and personal lenders, and the Federal Communications Commission sought to regulate the internet as a 1930s monopoly. With some 279,000 federal regulators churning out more than 650,000 pages in his Federal Registers, Mr. Obama bound the economy in red tape and imposed 50% more costly “major rules” than had ever been issued.

Despite strong private investment levels during the Obama era, labor productivity—the mother’s milk of wage gains—averaged less than half the growth of the previous 20 years. The problem was business “investment” was made to meet regulatory requirements, rather than to increase efficiency and expand the productivity of the economy.

While Mr. Obama’s regulators stifled business and job creation, Mr. Biden’s are openly hostile to the industries they regulate and to the American economic system. They seek not to protect investors and consumers but to make business serve government goals.

Through Mr. Biden’s executive orders and regulatory policy the American economy is being transformed from the great colossus of world capitalism into a subservient Vichy capitalism, whose master is government and not the consumer.

HKO

The regulatory burden rarely get the coverage of tax policy because it is complicated, hard to measure and reporters are lazy- yet the combination is the total friction cost on business. Increasing the regulatory burden (or other friction costs) while stimulating the money supply may be the simplest and best definition of stagflation.

There is a distinction between regulations to protect consumers and regulations to enact government policy.

There is another word for such government control of corporations. Vichy sounds much nicer.

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