Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich over the weekend recognized Paul Reynolds, Alabama’s Republican National Committeeman, for showing “real leadership for economic growth” by passing a strongly worded resolution at the RNC’s winter meeting in Washington, D.C.
Reynolds’ resolution slams the Obama Administration for having a “flawed understanding of how a capitalist economy succeeds,” and calls on Republican elected official around the country to help roll back the overburdensome regulations the Administration has placed on small business owners.
“Any time I have an opportunity to shine a light on what a disaster this president has been for small businesses and the free market in general, I’m going to do it,” Reynolds told Yellowhammer. “President Obama spent a lot of time in his State of the Union Address talking about so-called ‘income inequality,’ then turns around and places more and more restrictions on small business owners trying to make it. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what has made the American free market system the greatest engine of wealth creation the world has ever known. My resolution calls for the Republican Party to get behind regulatory reform full force. It’s time to liberate America’s entrepreneurs.”
Gingrich took to Twitter to voice his support of Reynolds’ resolution, which was easily passed by the full RNC.
Paul Reynolds of Alabama passed a very important regulatory reform resolution at the RNC meeting-showed real leadership for economic growth
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) January 24, 2014
“Speaker Gingrich has been a champion of the free market for a long time,” Reynolds said. “I’m very appreciative of his kind words of support.”
Reynolds is the President of Reynolds Technical Associates, a broadcast engineering firm, but has gained notoriety in conservative circles recently for founding the Alabama Free Market Alliance, an internet-based conservative advocacy group.
“I have to deal with absurd government regulations and taxes every day running my business,” Reynolds told Yellowhammer earlier this month. “I’ve been fortunate enough to have some success in spite of it, but it makes me sick to think that the generations of Americans coming behind us aren’t going to have the same opportunities because the government won’t get out of the way and let the free market work. That’s why I started [the Free Market Alliance] — to make as much racket as I can about the most intrusive, overbearing federal government this country has ever seen.”
Reynold’s RNC resolution can be read in full below:
WHEREAS, America works best when Americans are working; and
WHEREAS, the United States has a crisis of work with too many Americans unemployed or underemployed; and
WHEREAS, the current crisis of work represents a human tragedy for millions of Americans, many of whom are being relegated, along with their families, to decaying job skills, long-term unemployment, welfare, and hopelessness; and
WHEREAS, the current crisis of work has led to a deterioration of public finances, with an ever expanding national debt and no credible plan for balancing the federal budget; and
WHEREAS, the current crisis of work is an artificial crisis, sustained by the Democratic Party’s and Obama administration’s flawed understanding of how a capitalist economy succeeds in spurring innovation and generating new work opportunities as well as by the destructive economic, regulatory, and social policies this administration has adopted as a result; and
WHEREAS, this artificial crisis of work can be reversed as rapidly as the human mind can embrace a truer understanding of how a capitalist economy succeeds in spurring innovation and maximizing the creation of new work opportunities; and
WHEREAS, the Republican Party has consistently understood that the best conditions for a capitalist economy to innovate, grow, and create new jobs and new opportunities for the widest number of Americans include the rule of law, property rights, sound money, and clear and predictable tax rates and regulations, all of which must be defended and enforced by constitutional government;
WHEREAS, federal regulations that are unclear, burdensome, arbitrary, complex, costly, and inequitable impose real costs on the lives of individual Americans and present an especially egregious obstacle to job creation and the growth potential of the economy; and
WHEREAS, the destructive human and economic impact of the current array of federal regulations requires special national attention and an energetic national movement for regulatory reform led by the Republican Party (ATTACHMENT A hereto identifies two representative studies of the tremendous economic cost of federal regulations); and
WHEREAS, the wealth of a capitalist economy grows through the accumulation of knowledge. As Thomas Sowell observed in 1971: “All economic transactions are exchanges of differential knowledge, which is dispersed in human minds around the globe”; and
WHEREAS, federal regulations that are not simple, clear, understandable, low cost, or predictable are an enemy of the knowledge accumulation and are therefore an enemy of the growth of individual and national wealth. As Jude Wanniski wrote, “Growth comes not from dollars in people’s pockets but from ideas in their heads;” and
WHEREAS, any participant in the economy who confronts ambiguous, burdensome, and arbitrary federal regulations cannot act, cannot gain, share or receive new knowledge, cannot learn and therefore cannot innovate, and therefore cannot do their part to push the economy forward; and
WHEREAS, federal regulations that protect enterprises from failure and therefore prevent the generation of new knowledge made possible from failure are equally destructive of the growth of individual and national wealth; and
WHEREAS, regulatory reform that restructures, reduces, and/or eliminates wealth distorting regulations can liberate economic activity with enormous speed and become a tremendous driver of new economic growth and new work opportunities to end the current crisis of work; and
WHEREAS, effective regulatory reform will only be made possible with the focus and attention of the Republican Party and its officeholders and candidates; therefore be it
RESOLVED, that the Republican National Committee calls upon all Republicans in the House and Senate, presidential and other federal and state candidates, Governors and state legislators to make it a top priority to explain to the public (i) the individual and economic costs imposed by burdensome federal regulations, (ii) how ill considered regulations stifle human creativity and the accumulation of knowledge and innovation that allows for economic growth and job creation and which makes individual and national wealth possible, and (iii) the principles that should govern the reform of existing federal resolutions and the drafting and implementation of any new federal regulations.
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