Sen. Charles Grassley sent out an item the other day that included this: “In 2010 alone, 3,573 new federal rules were finalized.”

I’ve been wondering why the business community is putting so much blame on federal regulations for our inability to get the economy going again. America has always cranked out rules for everything from leaf burning (forbidden – the smoke makes it hard to smell the car exhaust) to hate crimes (come on, folks, keep your crimes affable). Why are they suddenly the big problem?

But a rate of 10 new rules per day does seem kind of extreme. It’s as if the country is being ruled by a bossy sixth-grader, instead of by the kind of devil-may-care money-grubbers who made this nation great.

If Andrew Carnegie had been compelled to pay his workers decent wages, we might not have as many libraries. If John D. Rockefeller had been dissuaded from creating a virtual monopoly, we wouldn’t have the Rockefeller Foundation. If John Dillinger had been convinced that bank robbery was wrong, Johnny Depp would have missed out on the chance to wear a fedora.

According to The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the Heritage Foundation, which analyzed data from the U.S. Government Accountability Office – which, for all we know, saw it on Facebook – we added 100 major federal rules in fiscal 2010, with “major” defined as having an effect on the economy of $100 million or more.

For one thing, rule-making is too easy. If you want something to be called a law, you have to lobby dozens of congressmen and watch them go through endless committee meetings, debates and votes. It takes months or years. But if you realize, “Hey, we could just call it a regulation,” you can start telling 300 million people what to do right after lunch.

There ought to be a rule about that.

For another, rules tend to ricochet. The Journal found a toy company owner who “hired a compliance director in 2008 just to keep up with government requirements. The next year, even as he laid off 20 percent of the company’s staff due to slumping sales, he added three more compliance workers to oversee strategies for satisfying federal product-safety rules.”

That’s no way to treat a toymaker. That’s how you treat a tobacco company.

But it’s also too easy for politicians to say “burdensome regulations,” which alternates nicely with “God bless the United States of America.”

And sometimes we citizens overreact. When the state decided that the cooking process needed an update at venerable Taylor’s Maid-Rite in Marshalltown, the owner announced that the new requirements might force him to shut the place down. Well, he could do that, said another franchise owner, “or he could buy a $50 roasting pan.”

Iowa’s most famous farmer, however, knows what he’s talking about when he criticizes the government’s obsession with regulating agricultural dust. Grassley brings this up every fall; you would think the government would lose interest and move on to some other cause, but apparently a few lawmakers have vowed to break up the big dust cartels.

“In each of my most recent town hall meetings the excessive amount of regulations coming out of Washington, D.C., and the impact on small businesses and rural communities was a top issue,” Grassley said in a press release. “The dust rule is a perfect example. It makes no sense to regulate the dust coming out of a combine harvesting soybeans or the dust off a gravel road of a pickup truck traveling into town.”

I don’t know, though. Gov. Branstad wants to create 200,000 jobs, and I’m picturing someone jogging along behind every combine and every pickup with a wet blanket and a big misting bottle.

Jim Pollock is the managing editor of the Des Moines Business Record. He can be reached by email at jimpollock@bpcdm.com