EDITORIAL: Economic optimism

Speaking of the business climate, Donald Trump’s Cabinet selections offer encouragement that the new administration will follow through on campaign promises to roll back or stall a federal regulatory state that grew to historic levels under Barack Obama.

For instance, Mr. Trump’s pick for Labor secretary, fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, has been an outspoken opponent of progressive efforts to jack the minimum wage beyond reason, noting that such a policy will kill jobs and hasten automation. The nominee to run the EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has actively fought many of Mr. Obama’s job-killing environmental regulations. And Rep. Tom Price, the president-elect’s selection for the Department of Health and Human Services, has long argued that the bureaucratic rules have choked the nation’s small businesses.

Those who create jobs are excited about the near future.

“The continued onslaught of regulation over the last eight years — that probably has been pretty much our No. 1 overall concern as manufacturers,” Jason Andringa, CEO of an Iowa machinery company, told the Wall Street Journal.

The head of a Chicago bottle manufacturer had a similar perspective. “If government can stimulate business to hire more, rather than vilify us, that’s going to be a better milieu,” he told the Journal.

Mr. Trump’s attitude might help improve the horrid conditions entrepreneurs have endured over the past decade. The Obama administration set a new record for imposing major regulations — those with price tags of $100 million or more — while tolerating an atmosphere in which business deaths exceeded business births for the first time in more than 30 years.

“I don’t think there has been a president in my lifetime who has been more hostile to business than Obama,” wrote Ed Rogers in 2015 in a blog for The Washington Post.

We can be thankful those days are almost gone.