Even John Kasich’s visual at his regulatory reform press conference was a scam.

John Kasich apparently doesn’t even know that most of Ohio’s regulations don’t even deal with businesses at all.

As part of Kasich’s endorsement of Governor Strickland’s regulatory reform, Kasich tried to stage a distracting visual for his press event (HT: Ohio Capital Blog):

OMG, just look at all those regulations!  It’s a virtual “Tower of Babble.”  How in the world can Ohio businesses operate when they’re subjected to THAT many boring brown regulatory books?

Kasich’s “visual” was a joke.  The books were each chapter of the Ohio Administrative Code.  If you click on the link, you’ll get a hyperlinked version of those books… (Well, actually not, but I’ll get to that in a second.)

And you’ll quickly notice that most of the chapters are intra-governmental regulations.  In other words, they only regulate the State government, not private businesses.  If Kasich were at least half honest, he should have left out most of those law books from his visual in the first place.

But those books don’t just contain the State’s regulations.  The books Kasich has there is the Annotated Ohio Administrative Code.  In other words, those law books don’t just contain the regulations themselves, but the statute authorizing the regulations, legislative and regulatory history, notes on every Ohio Attorney General opinion, law review article, and a note on every significant legal case that has ever applied, interpreted, or decided the constitutionality of those regulations in federal and state court

As you can imagine, that adds quite a bit to the bulk of those books, when you put just about every applicable legal case that referenced those regulations’ history.

Either Kasich doesn’t even understand what the Ohio Administrative Code is, or he’s betting you’re too stupid to figure out what a scam his visual was today.