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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (1283)	8/8/2008 12:26:57 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 86355

If your comparing country A, before and after the additional pages are added, then the extra pages probably mean more total intervention. If your comparing country A to country B, and you see that A has more pages of regulation, that is far from enough evidence to conclude that A is more interventionist than B. After all, how many pages of regulation do you need to say "the government will decide whatever it wants and impose it at the time of its choosing". Not that I think any country actually has a law or regulation which asserts such a thing, but some of them come close to acting that way. Even excluding leaving the intervention to the judgment of government officials, not all pages of regulations are equal. It takes less words to say "X is prohibited", than it does to say "X is allowed with a permit, which will be issued under conditions Y or Z". And it doesn't take more words to impose a 50% tax than it does to impose a 30% tax.