The role of government: Let 50 flowers bloom IT SOUNDS LIKE a character played by Clint Eastwood, or perhaps a type of gun. But the villains dispatched by the Repealer are much more mundane: outdated and unnecessary regulations that slow the growth of Kansas's economy. Sam Brownback, the state's governor, created the post as soon as he took office in 2010. He wanted, he explains, to free business from the burden of complying with an endless accumulation of rules. That is not the only thing Mr Brownback is doing for business in Kansas. Last year he persuaded the legislature to eliminate all tax on reinvested income for small businesses and to cut personal income tax. This year he is proposing to abolish personal income tax altogether. The governors of Nebraska and Louisiana are more ambitious still: they want to get rid of all corporate as well as personal income taxes. Indeed, these days governors everywhere are boasting about their efforts to improve the business climate, whether by trimming red tape or cutting taxes or running state-funded incubators for start-ups. The competition to attract investment is cut-throat: Idaho has set up a website and hotline to entice companies from neighbouring Oregon and Washington to relocate, complete with handy comparisons of crime, taxes and electricity costs. The state of Ohio has a full-time employee whose only responsibility is to poach jobs from California. Whether all this is helpful is a matter of dispute. In Kansas the Repealer has found few targets for his wrath. After a year of soliciting suggestions he came up with a list of 51 laws and regulations to be done away with, and the legislature duly dispatched them. They dealt, for the most part, with defunct government agencies, committees and funds and with little-used or obsolete laws. Few businesses will have noticed the difference. Mr Brownback is not the only politician to have declared war on regulation yet found it hard to engage the enemy. Mr Obama, apparently stung by claims that he was responsible for a "regulatory tsunami," in 2011 issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to seek out and destroy meddlesome bureaucracy. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a distant federal cousin of the Repealer, duly produced a collection of edicts whose revocation, it said, would save businesses $1 billion a year. Dairies are doubtless glad that the Environmental Protection Agency no longer makes milk subject to the same safeguards against spills as oil. But it is hard to see decisions of this kind as a cure-all for the economy. Every little helps That is too demanding a standard, perhaps. Even small improvements help, on the margin, just as modest extra requirements can accumulate into a punishing load. Moreover, even if the economic benefits are small, governments should still meddle as little as possible, on principle. Nonetheless crusades like Mr Brownback's and Mr Obama's tend to come up short because one man's pointless bureaucracy almost always turns out to be another's essential government function. Kansas's Repealer saw no need to do away with the state's (unconstitutional) law banning sodomy, but he was eager to dispense with committees on health care set up by the former Democratic governor, Kathleen Sebelius, who as the federal secretary of health and human services is now implementing Mr Obama's health-care reforms. Equally, Mr Obama sees no need to enforce the Defence of Marriage Act, which bars the federal government from recognising gay marriages, but fiercely defends the laws most often cited by Republicans as founts of job-killing regulation, the Dodd-Frank overhaul of the financial sector and the vexed health-care reforms. There is no doubt that both the health-care law and Dodd-Frank are unnecessarily bureaucratic. Yet reforms were clearly needed in both areas, and coming up with simple but effective ways to curb ballooning medical costs and systemic financial risks is a task all governments find difficult. Even Mr Brownback is unwilling to say that Kansans would cope just fine without a Board of Barbering to protect them from wayward hairdressers, although he does proudly note that he vetoed a recent bill that sought to impose further restrictions on the trade. It is also easy to paint opposition to regulation as self-interested. Democrats accuse Republicans of being in the pocket of big business every time they query clean-air rules, for example. Onerous regulation infuriates American businessmen. In some surveys, small firms rate it as their biggest concern, along with the cost of fuel and health insurance. Fortunately, however, most companies seem to focus on other considerations when deciding where to invest. Mr Markell, the governor of Delaware and a Democrat, and Pat George, secretary of commerce to Mr Brownback, a Republican, both agree that the complaint raised most often by the bosses they meet is the scarcity of suitable workers. A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found no correlation between the strength of feeling about red tape and job losses. To see how firms decide on where to locate their manufacturing or research, Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin, two professors at Harvard Business School, surveyed alumni who had been involved in such decisions. Cutting the wage bill was by far the most common reason for moving abroad; escaping red tape came in at number eight. Three of the five leading reasons for staying put - less corruption, greater security and stronger intellectual-property rights - constitute a vote of confidence of sorts in American regulation. The things that matter Bosses also seem surprisingly inured to America's monstrous tax code. At 35%, the corporate-tax rate is the highest in the rich world. Yet in the Harvard Business School survey tax rates were only number six on the list of reasons for offshoring, far behind labour costs. It helps that in practice most businesses pay far less than the official rate, thanks to the proliferation of loopholes. Mr Brownback points out that his state is winning residents from California, which has the country's highest personal income tax, and losing them to Texas, which has none. He argues that low-tax states grow faster, create more jobs and thus see their revenues grow more quickly than high-tax ones. But sceptics point out that these claims, though true, are entirely a function of population growth. Income per person actually grew faster in high- than in low-tax states between 2001 and 2010, and median household income declined less. Average unemployment, at 5.7%, was identical in both. Mr Markell argues that businesses follow skilled workers, and that the workers value "quality of life," meaning government investment in everything from bike trails to better public schools. Dane Stangler of the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship, notes that start-ups, especially the high-tech sort, tend to cluster in places with high taxes and heavy regulation, such as California and Massachusetts. And even Mr Brownback admits that when he talked to some of the state's bigger firms about abolishing corporate income tax, they said they would rather stick with the present system. The important thing is that America's 50 states are vigorously competing to find the best formula for regulation and taxes The important thing is that America's 50 states are consciously and vigorously competing to find the best formula for regulation and taxes and introducing sweeping reforms to that end. As this report has shown, they are also tackling many of the other glaring deficiencies of America's business environment, from infrastructure to education. The president, meanwhile, is trying to find ways around Congress's failure to reform the immigration system. And America's inventors and entrepreneurs are doing their bit to stimulate the economy, most notably by fostering a huge spurt of new oil and gas production. These changes will become systematic only if adopted or at least promoted at the federal rather than the state level. Congress could give them a huge boost with measures that should, in principle, win the support of both parties. Neither Republicans nor Democrats, after all, have a deep-seated ideological objection to simplifying the tax code or stimulating investment in research and development. Even in more contentious areas, such as immigration and education, both sides agree that more skilled workers are needed and the quality of teaching must improve. Whether or not Congress puts aside its fiscal vendetta long enough to help with any of this, progress is being made around the country. The changes afoot may be patchy, but they are significant and accelerating. The only way Washington's duelling politicians could kill off the budding improvements to America's competitiveness would be by deliberate sabotage. Sadly, that is not inconceivable, thanks to the capital's childish fixation with budgetary brinkmanship. In 2011 America came close to default because of a dispute between Republicans and Democrats over cutting the budget deficit. At the beginning of this year the two sides nearly pushed the country into recession amid yet another fiscal stand-off. On March 1st they allowed the sequester (a set of spending cuts intended to be so disastrous that no one would ever allow them to take place) to proceed - although they looked likely to reconsider within a few weeks, before too much damage is done. So far, at least, Congress and the White House have always stopped short of serious self-harm. And although they did not intend it, the constant to-ing and fro-ing has actually been quite benign. America has avoided the austerity-induced relapses into recession that have afflicted several European countries. It is gradually reining in its deficit, both by cutting spending and by raising more revenue. It will eventually need to do much more to confront rising health-care costs and trim its debts, but the task is not as urgent as most deficit hawks suggest. More to the point, it will get easier when the economy is growing faster - which is why it is so encouraging that beyond the Beltway, at least, politicians are finding ways to ease the restraints on growth.