Time & Perspective Quote by John Hutton

Hutton’s line is a neat piece of policy ventriloquism: it speaks in the calm, managerial voice of “common sense” while smuggling in a hard-edged political claim about who should pay for society’s ambitions. The opening move - “in the past” and “all too easy” - frames regulation not as deliberation but as a lazy habit. Legislators aren’t balancing trade-offs; they’re “loading” costs, like people stuffing an overfull suitcase and hoping someone else carries it. The verb choice matters: it makes public policy feel sneaky and burdensome rather than collective and legitimate.

Then comes the pivot that does the real work: “costs for business means costs for consumers.” It’s an aphorism masquerading as economics, compressing a contested chain of causation into a moral inevitability. The subtext is warning and absolution at once. If prices rise, don’t blame firms; blame the state. If social goals are worth pursuing, the quote implies, politicians should have the courage to tax openly rather than regulate indirectly. It’s a critique of “stealth redistribution” packaged as concern for the shopper.

Contextually, this sits comfortably in late-20th/early-21st century British debates about competitiveness, labor standards, environmental rules, and the political temptation to make businesses the villain-and-the-bank. But its elegance also reveals its limitation: markets don’t transmit every cost cleanly. Some costs hit profits, some reshape behavior, some are absorbed, and some prevent bigger costs later (pollution, injury, instability). The quote works because it turns that messy reality into a single, portable sentence - and because it quietly recruits the consumer as the ultimate constituency against regulation.