In last week’s post on the regulatory state I surmised that “a retrospective review of the [Obama administration’s] retrospective review exercise would prove it to be largely pointless.” Well, not quite. As the American Action Forum’s excellent Sam Batkins explains, agency review of old, outdated regulations has actually added some $14.7 billion in costs. Thank you, Doctor Sunstein.

To the iron laws of the administrative state, we should add the following:

1. It’s always worse than Greve thinks.
2. Never permit the administrative state to look back. Instead, let the heralded purposes of Congress and of rulemakings past get lost in the vast hallways of the federal bureaucracy.