Congressmen Andy Briggs has put forward a bill to abolish OSHA (link to bill below).
For those of you who don't know, OSHA is a bloated and corrupt corpse that is riding on the backs of American workers. It has been weaponized by the Deep State as a regulatory burden for companies to make them less competitive. Removing them will help restore America back to a time when we were the leading industrial power in the world. Its very existence is an insult to the intelligence and self-preservation instincts of American workers
There are some concerns here that we can address. First, won't this make employees less safe?
No, it won't. Businesses have a vested interest in keeping their workers safe—after all, dead or injured employees can’t produce profits! If OSHA were abolished tomorrow, companies would immediately adopt even better safety standards, because no employer wants to deal with high turnover, expensive lawsuits, or negative press. It’s simple economics: the invisible hand of the free market is more effective than the heavy hand of government. We don’t need OSHA because we already have laws against negligence. If an employer is really reckless, workers can sue. And if they can’t afford a lawyer? Well, that’s why personal responsibility exists. Workers will refuse to work for unsafe companies. This is the way it has been done for centuries before OSHA existed.
Further, OSHA infantilizes workers. OSHA forces workers to wear unnecessary safety gear that just slows them down. If someone wants to operate heavy machinery in flip-flops, that’s their right as an American. If we trust people to vote and drive cars, we should trust them to decide whether they need safety goggles.
Abolishing OSHA is not just about saving money—it’s about restoring faith in personal responsibility. Without OSHA, we would enter an era where businesses thrive and workers make their own informed choices. In other words, we would return to a system that worked perfectly fine before OSHA was created in 1971.
Yes, AND that free-market hand INCLUDES non-government regulatory agencies like the National Fire Protection Association (founded 1895) and UL, formerly Underwriter Labs, founded in 1894. (UL in particular has been somewhat corrupted in recent years by partial integration into OSHA, but the point still stands).
Without free-market (and thus open to competition, etc), non-profit regulation, the wonders of corporate concern for employees and customers don't always materialize (see Big Pharma, going back to the Rockefeller influence in the 1800s, for instance. Hell, see slavery in the Old South, for that matter).
Regulation is necessary.
GOVERNMENT "regulation" is a corrupt, cancerous simulacrum of honest regulation.
I hope that non-profit, non-government regulatory groups will quickly fill the gap that OSHA has been forcibly covering. No regulation can be as dangerous as bad and corrupt regulation.
EDIT: See The Market for Liberty (free at Mises.org or available at Amazon) for much detail on how actual liberty can much better supply needed regulation and other "government" roles than can coercive governance.
I was about to post similar to this. If you remove OSHA, fine, im happy too. BUT, an independent safety system should be required to take its place. Businesses and business owners suck. Ive personally seen a lot of people hurt and die from companies who don't give a crap about safety and push/bully employees to take excessive risk. It's a cop out to say businesses will care for the employees.
Moral ones will, but many won't until they're forced to. Too many bad actors to just pull that rug out without a suitable replacement. Take it back to the states, or make it an independent body, but strip it down first.
The free market can produce a system. Businesses create standards all the time. It may take a while, but they usually will all land at the same place. It can be like how certain products will say "this conforms with such and such standard". We do this for organic foods and IT equipment. Basically, when someone goes to apply for a job, they can look up what standards of workers rights and safety that the company voluntarily complies with. This will be efficient and will utilize the free market to help make decisions.
Exactly.