With a more top-down oriented economy and more government control, perhaps we could be more like Beijing!
The EPA did its most important work back in the 1970’s, and then the 80’s, and is a prime example of the law of diminishing returns. Cleaning up most of the trash is cheap and easy. Cleaning up the last part per trillion of cyanide costs a fortune and doesn’t accomplish anything.
Now the EPA doesn’t even bother with that, though, having been taken over by environmental radicals.
Washington Free Beacon article about their FOIA request that revealed massive collusion between the EPA and radical environmentalists, conspiring to silence critics and make sure both sides of a debate are not heard by holding hearings in remote places where they don’t expect any opposition to show up. Thomas Jefferson listed that kind of government behavior as one of the reasons for the American Revolution.
Many of the EPA officials involved should probably go to jail, but given what we’ve seen from this administration so far, they’ll undoubtedly get promoted.
Or the worst punishment a government employee can get in this administration: time off with pay.
The problem with organizations like the EPA is that, even if they do something useful, once they exist, you can never get rid of them. So they almost inevitably get into mission creep which causes far more harm than any benefit they once produced.
As for China, this is what you get when you put Commies in charge of a nation for decades. I thought the smog was bad when I was there in the mid-90s, but this is far worse.
Edward,
I agree with you but I see the mission creep a little different:
They start out doing something useful. They succeed.
In order to remain in existence they have to promote the emergency – can’t let the reason for their existence disappear. So they up the ante.
And then there’s the fact that everyone got used to having so much power. Some lowly DC bureaurcrat – who couldn’t convince their spouse to do anything, has all this power – write a reg and people snap to!
Who would want to give that up?
Both your comments just struck me with a way to describe the basic issue. A person has a health problem so they go to a doctor. But in this case, they hire a personal doctor (create the EPA) – who then only has the one patient. After the initial malady is cured, the doctor has to keep busy to justify his enormous salary, so he inevitably keeps finding new problems to treat. See Elvis or Michael Jackson for how that works out.
The analogy needs some development, but I think it might be useful at some level.
Judging by the water supply in West Virginia the EPA has their
work cut out for them.
The EPA can’t do much of anything to West Virginia because its two Senators are Democrats, as is its governor and 80% of the WV state senate. It would also be pointless because the spill is probably passing Paducah KY by now, having already swept past Cincinnati and Louisville.
There are reasons for the EPA.
Was chasing industry out of the US intended to be one of those reasons? Just because there is a reason, even a good reason, for doing something doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea.
Good point. One of the main consequences of the EPA has been to push industry out of America, where it was relatively clean, to China, where it’s incredibly dirty. So the Chinese can blame the EPA for much of this smog.
You’re right — we should eliminate the EPA so that we can have the same air and water quality as Shanghai.
BTW, I’ve traveled to Shanghai on business. If the air quality walking around doesn’t drive home the serious lack of regulations (or lack of enforcement of regulations), the fact that your executive hotel strongly recommends that you don’t drink the tap water in your room — or even use it to brush your teeth — certainly does.
So you’re seriously claiming that America was as bad as Beijing before the EPA was formed?
You seriously believe Americans would put up with smog so thick they can’t see across Tiananmen Square without suing the crap out of someone?
You really believe that nonsense?
The village idiot not only believes nonsense, but manufactures it with almost every comment.
So now the moron thinks that people here worship either Mitt Romney or Michelle Bachman, and in doing so, cements his status as the village idiot.
I loved the Wonkette piece about Bachman.
lathering reject Michele Bachmann showed off her fancy foreign policy knowledge at Saturday’s dull GOP debate by noting that the real capitalists over there in China don’t give out food stamps according to her expert sources.
It gets even more stupid from there. Does Wonkette know that little about how many tens of millions of Chinese literally starved to death because of their policies? It’s like praising the Auschwitz cafeteria for serving meals that meat Michelle Obama’s school food standards. Oh wait, they actually pretty much did that.
I’m sure Wonkette will soon make fun of some random Republican for implying that North Koreans don’t have a huge turkey for Thanksgiving, if she already hasn’t.
Enough Republicans Worshipped Michelle Bachmann she won the Iowa
Straw Poll, and Romney, didn’t he win the 2012 Primary?
Now if you want to say only Moronic Republican’s liked either of the
two, that’s your call.
I don’t mind saying that, given that I’m not a Republican, you moron.
China is praised by Obama for being a dictatorship.
China is usually held up by Democrats as an example of a country that can have both communist government and a functioning crony capitalist economy so we should let Obama be more like the Chinese. Then after extolling the virtues of communist one party rule, Democrats get upset if anyone mentions that Democrats hold a lot of beliefs in common with communists.
Worshiping China is something that right wing nutter Tom Friedman does.
And China has high-speed trains.
What our local Socialists and Marxist continually fail to notice is that the Central Command Governments were the ones who made the choices about where resources would be applied – and they almost never choose the Environment. They somehow think that over here the leadership would choose differently. For a while…they might….
But sooner or later the Central Commander realizes they have no more money, that the economy is NOT a Golden Egg that cannot be killed and that they have in fact killed it. NOW they have to make choices from a really bad set of possibilities and guess what gets dumped by the wayside?
You guessed it….the ecology.
And, by the way…the socialist/marxist * tools acolytes.
* Attempting strike through html here. Just letting you know as I can’t go back and fix it if I goofed.
There are reasons for the EPA.
With a more top-down oriented economy and more government control, perhaps we could be more like Beijing!
The EPA did its most important work back in the 1970’s, and then the 80’s, and is a prime example of the law of diminishing returns. Cleaning up most of the trash is cheap and easy. Cleaning up the last part per trillion of cyanide costs a fortune and doesn’t accomplish anything.
Now the EPA doesn’t even bother with that, though, having been taken over by environmental radicals.
Washington Free Beacon article about their FOIA request that revealed massive collusion between the EPA and radical environmentalists, conspiring to silence critics and make sure both sides of a debate are not heard by holding hearings in remote places where they don’t expect any opposition to show up. Thomas Jefferson listed that kind of government behavior as one of the reasons for the American Revolution.
Many of the EPA officials involved should probably go to jail, but given what we’ve seen from this administration so far, they’ll undoubtedly get promoted.
Or the worst punishment a government employee can get in this administration: time off with pay.
The problem with organizations like the EPA is that, even if they do something useful, once they exist, you can never get rid of them. So they almost inevitably get into mission creep which causes far more harm than any benefit they once produced.
As for China, this is what you get when you put Commies in charge of a nation for decades. I thought the smog was bad when I was there in the mid-90s, but this is far worse.
Edward,
I agree with you but I see the mission creep a little different:
They start out doing something useful. They succeed.
In order to remain in existence they have to promote the emergency – can’t let the reason for their existence disappear. So they up the ante.
And then there’s the fact that everyone got used to having so much power. Some lowly DC bureaurcrat – who couldn’t convince their spouse to do anything, has all this power – write a reg and people snap to!
Who would want to give that up?
Both your comments just struck me with a way to describe the basic issue. A person has a health problem so they go to a doctor. But in this case, they hire a personal doctor (create the EPA) – who then only has the one patient. After the initial malady is cured, the doctor has to keep busy to justify his enormous salary, so he inevitably keeps finding new problems to treat. See Elvis or Michael Jackson for how that works out.
The analogy needs some development, but I think it might be useful at some level.
Judging by the water supply in West Virginia the EPA has their
work cut out for them.
The EPA can’t do much of anything to West Virginia because its two Senators are Democrats, as is its governor and 80% of the WV state senate. It would also be pointless because the spill is probably passing Paducah KY by now, having already swept past Cincinnati and Louisville.
There are reasons for the EPA.
Was chasing industry out of the US intended to be one of those reasons? Just because there is a reason, even a good reason, for doing something doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea.
Good point. One of the main consequences of the EPA has been to push industry out of America, where it was relatively clean, to China, where it’s incredibly dirty. So the Chinese can blame the EPA for much of this smog.
You’re right — we should eliminate the EPA so that we can have the same air and water quality as Shanghai.
BTW, I’ve traveled to Shanghai on business. If the air quality walking around doesn’t drive home the serious lack of regulations (or lack of enforcement of regulations), the fact that your executive hotel strongly recommends that you don’t drink the tap water in your room — or even use it to brush your teeth — certainly does.
So you’re seriously claiming that America was as bad as Beijing before the EPA was formed?
You seriously believe Americans would put up with smog so thick they can’t see across Tiananmen Square without suing the crap out of someone?
You really believe that nonsense?
The village idiot not only believes nonsense, but manufactures it with almost every comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_St._Louis_smog
1939 St Louis smog ranks on a par with what we see in Beijing these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donora_Smog_of_1948
dn-guy: “This is what Republicans want. They should move to China.”
China is held up by republicans as a business friendly environment
Only by “republicans” who are morons. You know, like you.
Mitt Romney Praises China’s Regulators
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/mitt-romney-chinese-regulators_n_1334799.html
Michelle Bachmann Praises China.
http://wonkette.com/456107/michele-bachmann-is-completely-unaware-that-china-is-communist
So now the moron thinks that people here worship either Mitt Romney or Michelle Bachman, and in doing so, cements his status as the village idiot.
I loved the Wonkette piece about Bachman.
It gets even more stupid from there. Does Wonkette know that little about how many tens of millions of Chinese literally starved to death because of their policies? It’s like praising the Auschwitz cafeteria for serving meals that meat Michelle Obama’s school food standards. Oh wait, they actually pretty much did that.
I’m sure Wonkette will soon make fun of some random Republican for implying that North Koreans don’t have a huge turkey for Thanksgiving, if she already hasn’t.
Enough Republicans Worshipped Michelle Bachmann she won the Iowa
Straw Poll, and Romney, didn’t he win the 2012 Primary?
Now if you want to say only Moronic Republican’s liked either of the
two, that’s your call.
I don’t mind saying that, given that I’m not a Republican, you moron.
China is praised by Obama for being a dictatorship.
China is usually held up by Democrats as an example of a country that can have both communist government and a functioning crony capitalist economy so we should let Obama be more like the Chinese. Then after extolling the virtues of communist one party rule, Democrats get upset if anyone mentions that Democrats hold a lot of beliefs in common with communists.
Worshiping China is something that right wing nutter Tom Friedman does.
And China has high-speed trains.
What our local Socialists and Marxist continually fail to notice is that the Central Command Governments were the ones who made the choices about where resources would be applied – and they almost never choose the Environment. They somehow think that over here the leadership would choose differently. For a while…they might….
But sooner or later the Central Commander realizes they have no more money, that the economy is NOT a Golden Egg that cannot be killed and that they have in fact killed it. NOW they have to make choices from a really bad set of possibilities and guess what gets dumped by the wayside?
You guessed it….the ecology.
And, by the way…the socialist/marxist *
toolsacolytes.* Attempting strike through html here. Just letting you know as I can’t go back and fix it if I goofed.