Some additional addenda

In thinking about my recent (12/30/11, below) modest proposal -- yes, I know, I'm not supposed to be thinking about it -- a few additional points came to mind:

• The Job Multiplier -- Every pointless regulatory job created at the federal level would create at least 10 more jobs at the state and local levels, not to mention the affected industries scrambling to hire folks to comply/scam the new regulation. Money well spent in lubricating the economy.
• Funding -- "Just who's going to pay?" comes to mind. It's all Pay as You Go via application and use fees. Let's say I want to kill my neighbor. There's an initial application, environmental impact documents, various agency approvals, announcements, and god-knows-what-else-a-motivated-legislator can come up with. Each step has a nominal fee to cover costs. Plus I'll probably have to hire someone to guide me through the maze -- there's another private sector job right there! Once it's all signed and sealed my neighbor may not show up at the appointed time and place, so there needs to be a compliance officer to insure that I don't take matters into my own hands by going out of bounds -- this is probably a public sector job. On the other hand I may have annoyed the neighbor so much that he DOES show up armed with the necessary permits. Then we have a good old fashioned duel on our hands, and may need a second compliance officer to enforce whatever rules the-motivated-legislator has determined to be necessary. But I should be able to retain any funds which exceed the license fees, so there is profit to be made at each turn. If one applies this system to something like Credit Default Swaps I think you can imagine just how much potential profit, even subtracting fees, is available for exploitation.
• Some Things Are Too Important to Be Obfuscated -- For instance I would say this includes Emergency Services -- the Fire and EMS which are close to my own heart and some subsets of Law Enforcement (there are whack jobs out there {I leave the precise definition to the reader} and it would be counter-productive to require private citizens to go through the whole permit process in order to get them under control). This stuff falls under what I would call the Sturgeon's Revelation clause: 90% of everything is crud. Where the remaining 10% (maybe downgraded to 5% these days) is this Too Important to Fail stuff. So I would lighten up a bit on the regulations here and actually make a concerted effort to provide these services efficiently. I haven't seen any of the limited government folks address this. Do we really eliminate all services dedicated to the public good? How about Stop signs at busy intersections? Or even roads themselves? Obviously there are opportunities for constructive argument here.

Interestingly enough Sturgeon stumbled on a classification system similar to the 80-20 Pareto Principle (that Pareto guy really got around didn't he?) which shows some empirical evidence that 80% of everything takes 20% of the resources and vice-versa. While working in the tech industry I independently developed my own 80/15/5 rule of thumb: 80%-Crap/15%-Gray-area/5%-Non-crap, which proved to be fairly useful. This could be applied to the task of determining exactly how to classify all the various public services.