One of the smarmier arguments used by pseudo-environmentalists to justify their socio-economic predations is that large multi-national corporations want more regulations, whether they make any sense or not, because it improves their competitive position in all markets and yields economies of scale.

Why would companies want more regulation? Much of it is a desire for consistency, a "level playing field." Companies doing business in both more-regulated and less-regulated areas often find that meeting multiple rules can be costly. Greater regulation can end up being less of an issue than diverse regulation. This is one of the reasons that even the CEO of Duke Energy called for federal carbon taxes -- so as to avoid 50 different state tax schemes.

Collusion between large corporations and governments is nothing new, it's just garden variety rent-seeking - "The pursuit of government policies or programs that transfer income to one person or group at the expense of others." Carbon taxes won't help anyone or anything, they just raise revenue for governments, but the CEO doesn't care about that so long as he has a smooth road to travel with fewer competitors. He gets to collect his rents. Now that's social responsibility!

Who bears the expense? Well, the customers of course, but they may be persuaded to pay. The real objective is to raise the cost of entry for new competitors and drive smaller competitors out of business. Large corporations can then force smaller companies to play their global game instead of the locals forcing the multi-nationals to play by local rules.

As ugly as this is it isn't the worst part. The worst part is that regulations reduce diversity. This slows progress and ends in stagnation and collapse. It's self defeating on a grand scale. It also stalls the discovery machine, stifles innovation, even stifles the desire for innovation as efforts shift from using resources productively to manipulating the regulatory environment skillfully. You get what you manage for whether you grasp what that will be or not. Regulations breed bureaucrats and rent seekers - social weeds and pests rather than crops.

It isn't that there is never a need for regulation, it is that it's a serious step that causes harm and has to be a desperation move, like when a farmer has a plague of insects that will destroy him so he gets out the insecticide reserved for dire emergencies in his integrated pest management plan. You hate to do it but sometimes you must. It hurts you to do it but sometimes not as bad as not doing it. Regulations are poison that you sometimes have to use, but always do so with regret and do as little as possible.

The irony is that everything Europe tries to achieve by regulation will be achieved better and cheaper by innovation in the more dynamic parts of the world. The center of progress has shifted so far west of Europe that it's coming around again from the east. The massive populations of the developing world make up 5 out of 6 consumers and increasingly they will call the tune, especially for the large corporations that salivate at the thought of those developing markets. Their demand for resources will provide the incentive to be efficient, to avoid wasting material and energy that could be turned into products, and in the process eliminate pollution. This may be hard to grasp in their early stages of development since they are inefficient and wasteful now. The trick is to look where they are going rather than where they have been to determine useful policies.

Europe is the brute force type of farmer that bombs his crops with every pesticide and herbicide in the arsenal. More thoughtful and skillful farmers go with the flow, use natural rhythms and encourage pest competitors rather than just killing everything but the target crop regardless of the consequences. They lose some crops to pests but they save some costs and haven't polluted their land. Europe hasn't yet evolved the socio-cultural maturity to use natural social methods. They're still in the steam age intellectually, stuck-on-stupid as they say, unable to progress to more natural methods that work with society instead of against it.

It's useful for the US to remember that it was founded by refugees from Europe and structured as the anti-Europe. This has repeatedly been shown to have been a brilliant move and continues to be so today. Europe continues to blunder along, doing everything late, and then doing it to excess, and punking itself. The task of this age is, more than ever, the avoidance of socio-cultural pollution - the slide into barbarism that results from rigidity and over control of society. The US avoided established religion when that was the scourge of Europe, choosing instead to allow and encourage diversity and even abstinence if that was what worked, and avoided the various totalitarian ideologies that swept Europe last century, as well as many other manias and funks. Less control, less regulation, more diversity and generally more freedom isn't just a nicer way to live for free thinkers, it's a more successful way to live that trades some small losses - like the farmer who gets a few insect spots on his crops - to avoid the big losses of over control, loss of balance and total collapse that has plagued Europe for so long.