Senator Hickenlooper, speaking to CNBC, makes what seems to me a sound observation: that housing and healthcare have grown so expensive in part because the rules surrounding them have grown so thick. I will not pretend to have walked a modern hospital corridor or filed a modern building permit, but I have watched, in my own time, what happens when a guild or a licensing board accumulates the power to say no — prices rise, supply shrinks, and the person of modest means does without.

The principle is old enough to need no footnote. Every unnecessary restriction on the supply of a necessary good is a tax levied not by the legislature but by the rulebook. The tenant who cannot find an affordable room and the laborer who delays a physician because the bill frightens him are both paying that tax, invisibly, every day.

I would caution, however, against the assumption that all regulation is waste. Some rules protect the buyer from the dishonest builder and the patient from the careless practitioner. The question worth asking — the one I always asked of any proposed law when I sat in the Pennsylvania Assembly — is: who bears the cost, and who collects the benefit? If the answer is that established interests collect the benefit and newcomers bear the cost, then the rule deserves scrutiny regardless of its stated purpose.

On healthcare in particular, I will speak with some humility, for the machinery of modern medicine is beyond my direct knowledge. But the household economy of it is not. When a family must choose between paying the rent and paying the pharmacy, the Republic has failed one of its basic bargains. Credit, too, plays a role here — and I have long held that the cost of borrowing is never just the interest rate; it is also the habits the debt installs in the borrower. A nation that finances its healthcare through emergency debt rather than through affordable ordinary access is mortgaging its own vigor.

Senator Hickenlooper's counsel, as reported by CNBC, is that big policy changes are needed. That may be so. But I would remind any legislator that a big change badly designed is merely a big new obstruction wearing the costume of reform. The test is always concrete: when this rule is in force, what will the working tradesperson or the small farmer actually pay or receive? Start there, and the answer to how much regulation usually becomes obvious.

Counsel for the working person: If you are renting or hoping to buy, attend your local zoning board meetings. Those rooms are often nearly empty, and the decisions made in them shape your housing costs more directly than most legislation passed in a distant capital. Civic participation, like compound interest, rewards early and steady attention.