Employers Swamped by Good Intentions

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One of the hidden costs of regulation is the intellectual burden of keeping up with it. In many cases, finding out what the rules are can be more than a full-time job. Consider the area of employer-employee relations.

A few months ago, an odd travel brochure arrived in my mail. It wasn't printed in four colors, and it didn't invite me to Hawaii or Cancun. No, this brochure offered me Dullsville. Printed on gray paper in blue ink, it urged me to come to the Doubletree Riverside Hotel in Boise, Idaho, to attend an all-day seminar on wage-and-hour legislation. My first reaction was, who would ever go on such an unappealing excursion?

Then I realized that probably I should. …