South North Carolina News

A former University of North Carolina at Pembroke professor believes excessive government regulations enacted due to COVID-19 slows the crisis response, according to The Robesonian.

Eric Dent, who teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University, believes excessive regulations reduce risk-taking but it increases paperwork.

"The theoretical advantage is in accuracy," Dent wrote in a column for The Robesonian published on April 3. "No doubt some tests and medicines that have come out of China have not performed as intended. The problem is no politician, or certainly legislative body, is smart enough to know what policies need to be in place for changing dynamics and emergencies."

Dent believes that isn’t possible because policies are usually written for stable times and no one can predict how to create rules for an emergency. He believes deregulation is the "secret ingredient," as he calls it, to keeping growth going.

Dent writes that government isn't only a problem at the federal level, but at state levels as well, as he discovered in the mid-2000s that he wouldn't be able to open an outpatient surgical center because he had to have Certificate of Need (CoN) to continue with the idea.

"CoN laws throughout America allow existing businesses to prevent competition and increased services to people by blocking new businesses from being created," Dent writes. "CoN laws have reduced the number of hospital beds across the country."

Dent believes reducing excessive regulation at every single government level would help many get jobs.

Dent said that after the 2003 SARS outbreak, the Government Accountability Office reported that hospitals were not prepared and did not have enough ventilators, however, nothing was done about that. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even warned the Strategic National Stockpile that ventilators were needed, he writes.

"So, reducing excessive regulation at all levels of government is not just a matter of helping the poor get more jobs, it is also a matter of life and death," Dent writes.