The regulator in chief

Barack Obama dropped in to address attendees of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in the Bay Area last week. The Associated Press reported the president told the crowd that “it is vital” to ensure they “have the right tools to start new businesses.”

Perhaps Mr. Obama — with his hectic schedule and all — got his audiences confused, delivering instead a joke-laden speech intended for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Surely the president was going for laughs when he professed devotion to helping young entrepreneurs succeed in the marketplace.

In fact, this White House has been perhaps the most anti-business administration in the nation’s history. In recent months, the president has broken his own records for padding the Federal Register, issuing a flurry of regulations since January “at an estimated cost of $69.5 billion to the nation’s businesses,” Politico noted in May.

The rules hamper a whole host of industries touching a wide swath of the private sector, including companies dealing in health care, financial services, mining, energy and foodstuffs. Other mandates, such as changes to overtime rules, hit virtually all private employers.

At the end of the president’s first term, the Heritage Foundation found, the cost of federal regulation had increased by $70 billion — and Mr. Obama hasn’t looked back. The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that in 2015 the administration added more than 81,000 pages of regulations to the Federal Register, a new high.

Nor do all these new rules affect only large corporations with cushy corner offices filled by the dreaded 1 percent.

“Compliance with government rules and laws is a greater encumbrance on small companies than large ones, and regulation hinders small business formation, growth and job creation,” points out Case Western business professor Scott Shane, in a 2014 essay for Entrepreneur magazine.

A 2015 paper by researchers with the American Action Forum bolstered Mr. Shane’s point. “Specifically, with a 10 percent increase in regulatory costs, there is a 5 to 6 percent fall in the number of businesses with fewer than 20 workers,” the study found.

Indeed, talk to most small business owners and they’ll tell you that their biggest obstacle — other than access to capital, perhaps — remains navigating the regulatory apparatus at the local, state and federal levels.

The result of the continuously expanding red tape remains an economy sputtering along with historically feeble growth rates, constantly teetering on the brink of recession. Meanwhile the architect of this “new normal” tells a group of young entrepreneurs that he seeks to make it easier for them to thrive in their business endeavors.

Har dee har har.