Sunday, March 30, 2014

Regulation, regulation, regulaton

I read today that the newest thing the Obama administration is getting ready to regulate is cow flatulence.  I'm not making this up.  There are all kinds of other things going on in the world such as Crimea, possible trade wars (including, most recently, India's violation of several trade agreements by requiring 50% of all their solar panel production be locally sourced), starvation, wars in Sudan, the ascension of those that hate us in Egypt and Libya (see Muslim Brotherhood), and the carnage in Syria, to name a few.  Here, we still have record numbers of people on long term unemployment, close to record numbers of people who are not counted in the unemployment numbers because they've left the work force (work force participation rate), hunger--we have record numbers of people on food stamps, problems in the military (22 soldiers per day are committing suicide) and so forth and so on.  Yet this administration finds it necessary to worry about cows farting?  So at first I said to myself, "Are you kidding me?"
After thinking about if for a while, however, I realized it has nothing to do with cows farting.  It has to do with control.  This administration seeks total control over the entire economy, and total control over people's lives.  The ACA (Obamacare) runs to about 2600 pages.  However, that is nothing compared to the regulations which have been written to enforce and tweak it.  We're now at about 60,000 pages and counting.  The administration recently issued new regulations, through the EPA, regulating coal fired plants' emissions.  Never mind that this will make energy prices skyrocket and put thousands of Americans out of work.  Never mind that China is putting a thousand coal burning plants on line per month.  This administration has written regulations on virtually everything under the sun, and I've become convinced that the purpose is to slowly but surely attain control over, well, everything in America.
America is a grand experiment.  Never before, with the possible exception of ancient Greece, has a democracy such as ours flourished.  I understand the need to have rules, for there are dishonest and greedy people who don't care about the quality of our air and water as long as they can make a buck.  But the regulation of our society down to the littlest detail has resulted in a world where we literally can't do anything without being affected in some way by government regulation.  The problem with regulations is that they never move towards more freedom.  They are always written to exert more government control over whatever it is that's being regulated.  So we have Obamacare.  This law, in one fell swoop, gave control over a sector of our economy worth about 1/7 of our GDP to the government!  Talk about a power grab!  Now, with the regulations written about coal fired powered power plants Obama has fulfilled his promise from 2008 when he said that anyone can open a coal fired power plant, but it will go bankrupt.  In the guise of saving the world from global warming, the president wants to regulate cow flatulence.  You see, cow's anal gas contains methane, which is a greenhouse gas.  In my opinion, however, this is just a further salvo in the battle by the state for control of the country.  They have health care.  They have regulated themselves into control of the energy sector of the economy, and now they're going after agriculture.  Combine that with a spy program that knows what people are doing every second of the day, and you can see that the government has slowly become too powerful.
America's democracy is at stake.  The land that is by the people and for the people has become the land of those that govern and those that are governed.  We need somebody who will be willing to do what is right for America, and not just for him or herself or his or her party.  We need somebody willing to cut back on the size and scope and power of government.  We need somebody whom we can trust when they say they will focus on job creation like a laser beam rather than someone who says that then focuses on everything but that.  We need someone who cares more about Americans having a job and less about how much cows are farting.

2 comments:

  1. I firmly believe that Congress should have voting power over regulations. It can be done. It should be done. It must be done. Obama's executive orders are nothing compared to the unchecked power of bureaucracies.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I feel you are correct in that the president is circumventing the law with regulations (and executive orders), but do we want to have Congress litigate every single regulation? I'm not sure that would work. They can't even get a budget through the Senate right now, imagine them fighting over thousands of regulations. I don't know the solution for this, but it is out of control. You've raised an excellent point.

    ReplyDelete