Posted 03/19/2012 07:00 PM ET, Investors.com
Regulatory Tyranny: Washington has extended the deadline by 60 days for hotels to install lifts for the disabled in their pools. But nothing changes in two months. The government will still be invading private matters.
The regulation was to take effect last week. But the Justice Department has given hotels an additional 60 days to comply. How generous.
The regulation, written by the Obama administration in 2010 based on the Americans With Disabilities Act, affects nearly every one of the roughly 51,000 hotels in the U.S., since there are few that have no pools.
The impact would actually be wider than that. In many cases, properties have more than one pool, and each pool, or “water feature” — which includes whirlpools — must have a lift.
With each lift costing as much as $6,000, hotels are being required to make significant investments in equipment that will get little use. Hotels could simply refuse to comply, but a lack of compliance through failure or refusal results in fines that can reach $55,000.
Some will say the government’s order is only fair. And while a portion the population will no doubt benefit from the rule, we have to ask: Is it a legitimate function of government to intrude into private affairs?
Regulation supporters will argue that every paying customer has an equal right to hotel pool access. But such a right requires the violation of the hotel owners’ right to the money they have earned in peaceful, voluntary transactions. How can something be a right when to provide another’s right must be violated?
A government that can dictate how businesses are run is no longer merely a government. It is a plundering force operating without constraint.
This isn’t merely an issue of pool lifts at hotels. It’s about a mandate to buy health care insurance; it’s about telling the auto industry it has to meet a bureaucratically concocted fuel-economy standard; it’s about the compulsory participation in the welfare state.
It is, as well, about seizing private property at government whim; it’s about any of the thousands of regulations that clog the Federal Register and the incessant “lawmaking” in capitols, city halls and county chambers that has no regard for our freedom. It’s about government no longer being the protector of God-given rights, but coercively creating “rights” that don’t exist.
If voters don’t soon re-examine their principles, the plundering force will have grown too big to ever be contained.