“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.
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