President Bush and The Federal Register

I’m going to try a Cactus post and look at the Bush record.

On 11 June 2004 Milton Friedman published an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal Editorial page called Freedom’s Friend. In the article he used the number of pages in the Federal Register each year as a measure of government interference in peoples lives and a measure of freedom.

It was a good idea and I thought I would update his research.

Since Reagan cut the number of pages in the Federal Register it has been rising again and the Bush administration is on course to set a new all time record of pages published in the Federal Register. In the first seven years of the Bush administration the number of pages averaged 75,208 pages as compared to 71,592 under Clinton. The Bush average is even larger than the Carter average of 72,333 pages.

So it appears that Milton Friedman would not claim Bush as Freedom’s Friend.