“The EPA’s regulatory agenda is a perilous pipe-dream precluded by the laws of math and physics—relying instead on implausible assumptions about health risks from exposure to trace background levels of the single pollutant known as particulate matter.”
Click for this terrific new paper from the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Friends, go to Libby, Montana and see for yourself the EPA cleanup of asbestos contamination. The overall program appears to be a grossly out of whack risk assessment with no consideration of cost/benefit. On-the-ground cleanup has been a debacle: replacing fertile soil with sterile soil and not running soil samples to determine what is being put back. They then halfheartedly admit the replacement soil was sterile, then do a half-ass job of trying to correct it. There is so much waste of wealth – taxpayer and private. It is shameful. It is supplying a few people with make work in a county with an official unemployment rate of around 20%. Most of the workforce has had to leave for other parts of the country to find some kind of work, so that figure is low. A pathetic display of federal over regulation and mismanagement.
Idealism is a bad guideline. It shields people from reality where things just don’t work as they should in an utopic vision of a applegreen world filled with butterflies that never sprouted from nasty plantdestroying caterpillars.
The problem is they have no authority to do most of what they do. That the people support it only shows that people like fascism. As O’Reilly says, “Looking out for the people.” It isn’t the federal government’s job to look out for the people. When they stop, the lobbyists will disappear.
One interesting quote from the preface: “Government by popularly elected representatives on the one hand and government by federal administrators swearing by the authority of science, on the other hand, are contradictory notions.”
True enough.
But what do we make of a situation where the two are conjoined? When scientists present evidence and conclusions in order to appeal to the political interests of popular representatives?
The problem is that democracy and science are not contradictory, inherently or otherwise. Popular lies cannot be redeemed through adulation.
More regulation of less and less. How else would the EPA and associated consulting groups survive?