The Circus is back in town.  Or maybe it never left.  The names remain the same, the form of the cause evolves slightly, but the theme persists.  Shut down growth.  Keep the country in the county.  Save us.

Locally it started with the Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse, a creature near and dear to our hearts that was uniquely threatened by evil developer bulldozers.  We awoke to find one day that this rodent species owns a whole basket of usurped property rights.  Based on this novel discovery, hundreds of green and left warriors combined with sympathetic government regulators to form the Circus and bring into existence, by mere presumption, thousands of pages of growth-stopping regulations.  They empowered the federal Environmental Protection Agency and all subordinate levels of government to save that mouse, and by their curious chain of cause and effect, us too.  The economic clout now wielded on behalf of that mouse makes it one of the most powerful rodents in the history of the universe, probably second only to Mickey.  And we were not saved.

The Circus rested for a bit and recharged its batteries.  Then along came an evil developer intent on bringing commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision for a super highway complete with utility corridors and railroad tracks.  Imagine the environmental impacts–pretty much the worst things possible–the smog all that transportation would cause, the ancient trees to be felled, the noise, the light.  Don’t go toward the light!  Imagine the poor mice that would have to be relocated and provided similar habitat—if it could even be found—outside of the right of way.  The damages would surely be irreparable.  The Circus shifted into high gear and put the pedal to the metal.  They rented busses to carry occupants to the State capitol.  They saturated planning and commissioner meetings.  They filled the internet with a relentless onslaught of do or die hyperbolic predictions about the end of the world that this road would precipitate.  The end of the world was serious stuff.  No one wanted that.  The laws were passed, the court cases came in.  The Circus rested.  And still we were not saved.

One day an evil developer came along, intent on bringing water commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision for long distance water transportation to quench the thirst of citizens in a sub-development in Colorado Springs.  The Circus double clutched their well-oiled machine and slipped it into gear.  Hundreds of loud clamorers filled auditoriums,  government meetings and state house offices with a new flag of presumed entitlement, “our water.”  The fact that not a drop of it actually belonged to them gave them no pause.  “Our water” was not actually “their water” but the mob has never been one to quibble about details like legal property rights.  They were all about momentum, sound bites and the persuasion of pure force.  Demonstrators and occupyers don’t wait for the subtleties of legal technicalities, unless of course a legal technicality can be found to put wind into their sails, that’s another matter.  The evil developer was persuaded to recede into the tapestry of the world, and the Circus rested once again.  And still we were not saved.

Then along came the evil energy developers, intent on bringing commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision of energy independence from the beneficial use of dormant oil and gas supplies lying ten thousand feet down in the ground.  The Circus kicked their machine into overdrive.  To save us once again, the green and left warriors sallied forth and wrote hundreds of pages of zoning laws incorporating every growth stopping agency and device ever conceived by statist man.  They employed lawyers to tune their language so those laws could only be challenged—never repealed—by endless years of impossibly expensive litigation.

The Roman government gave bread and circuses to the people to distract them from the messy details of their oppressive governors.  Today’s Circus combines the clamoring class of green and leftist warriors with a sympathetic regulatory class of unelected bureaucrats, to form the government itself.  Gone are those halcyon times when the mob could be placated by mere food and entertainment.  Perhaps conditioned by reality TV, the mob now insists on being part of the action.  They want a hand in actually creating the government fascism that will turn around and oppress them.  So long as they can applaud a victory, it matters not that the beast they create intends to dine on them.

For all their efforts put in to save our quality of life, our environment, and our property values, you’d think real estate around here would be getting more expensive.

The Jews have their Talmud, the Muslims their Hadiths, exhaustive rules of religious law and taboo to define every nuance of permissible human action.  Secular Americans have City, County, State and Federal regulations in a great fascist web waiting to entrap citizens, pending the whim of an invisible unelected bureaucratic shaman somewhere who may notice a non-compliant act, and who then brings down the wrath of government upon the citizen, er, applicant.

The applause is always deafening.

“Why bother with an environmental impact assessment if the decision was always going to be made for political reasons?” WSJ, 1/19/2012, pg. A14.

Excellent question, and it points squarely to the agenda motivating Elbert County greens in pushing through impossibly complex local oil and gas zoning. This zoning putsch masquerades under saving property values, sparing the environment, and smart growth, but those are just platitudes for the rubes.

This zoning would create a matrix of imponderable and unchallengeable laws administered by a czar, who would conduct numerous public planning circuses for green activists to attend and applaud, for the sole purpose of displaying oil and gas development blasphemers for the greens to ridicule.

The political decision has already been made by these people. Please, save us all a lot of time and money. We’re not stupid. We don’t need your sacrificial rituals to the green gods. Just ban it for the taboo that you’ve already decided it is.

And I want to see the Community and Development Services director wear a witch doctor’s headdress at future BOCC meetings, you know, something befitting a smartly dressed shaman.

Text of letter: AG letter to El Paso County of 1-10-2012

Attorney General warns El Paso County on proposed oil and gas regs

ANDREW WINEKE

2012-01-17 16:26:51

The Attorney General’s Office last week sent a letter warning El Paso County that its proposed oil and gas drilling regulations conflicted with state regulations.

The letter, dated Jan. 10, cited proposed rules on setbacks, excavations, water quality, wildlife, visual and noise impacts and permitting that it argued are in the purview of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

“The county should reject the proposed rules discussed above as being in operational conflict with the (oil and gas commission’s) regulatory regime,” the letter concluded. “The county should reject the proposed rules discussed above for the additional reason that exhaustive local regulations are unnecessary.” (more…)

“Every year regulatory compliance costs U.S. businesses $1.75 Trillion. That would be enough to hire 43 Million workers.”

See this short youtube video at Episode Two: Economic Freedom in America Today.

Regulation is not only a Federal problem.  Regulation is pernicious, at every level of government.  Today Elbert County has a clear choice whether or not to greatly expand our county’s regulatory reach into energy development matters it knows next to nothing about.

At the county level the force of regulation is imposed through zoning law.  Our county’s Community and Development Services department works every day to write, refine, expand, detail and enforce their ubiquitous vision of a perfectable society.  They want to save this land and this county from its people because, essentially, they don’t trust the people.

They think they are wise stewards who, with a third-party steward’s interest, have a more valuable right to forecefully impose their vision about a sound local economy, than the stakeholders and property holders in the county have in doing so for themselves.

Zoning regulators think that by stopping people from the pursuit of economic activity, they serve a higher purpose of preservation of our local world.  This of course begs questions of preservation for what?  For who?  For when?  And for why?

Of course they have answers for all of these questions.  The answers are myths — myths consisting of more tenuous myths in a great pyramid of “smart,” sustainable, no-growth, enviro-jihad mythology.

The future beneficiaries of county zoning and regulation don’t exist.  They are a myth–not real–and unless you’re a believer, not even foreseeable.  The great probability is they will never come to exist because future unforseen circumstances will change everything long before these present day socio and eco myths can ever be tested, long after they are forgotten in favor of some future mythology as yet unkown.

Man took matters that used to be in God’s domain and invested them in Gaia, the environment and universe-trekking aliens. That’s what humans do at the margins of their knowledge where observation ends and speculation begins–we create mythologies–myths that we love.   And then we create the legalities to enforce those mythologies.

Regulatory zealots consider this sort of talk heresy.  They believe that the forced perfectibility of man and the environment is actually possible.  Just as the power that was - the Church - once defended Ptolemy’s geocentric universe against the heresy of Copernicus, so too the regulatory powers of today know, without a shadow of doubt, that they know best, and that they can sufficiently describe, legislate, and enforce a set of rules to govern our behavior, for our own best interest.

To even imagine they could succeed at such a task is a pinnacle of hubris.  When has an authoritarian process ever led to a best outcome for its subjects?  When have a small minority of minds ever created the economic output of a diverse population acting in their own interests?  The regulatory model cannot succeed.

Regulation makes inevitable change much more costly.  The regulatory parties in government who do this to us have no personal skin in the game–only myths and the iron fist–a deadly combination.  Ironically, the regulatory mission of governing progressives is about the most regressive thing they could do.

If we can’t stop creating mythologies, at least we should learn to stop legalizing them.

~

On the subject of county level oil and gas regulations:

“In that same spirit, we intend to work with counties and municipalities to make sure we have appropriate regulation on oil and gas development, but recognize the state can’t have 64 or even more different sets of rules.”

http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2012/01/12/text-hickenloopers-state-of-the.html?page=all

Perhaps the tide of regulatory proliferation of the myth of a perfectable society has turned around on all the would-be czars and county potentates in Colorado’s planning and zoning departments.

Our freedom depends on it.