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« on: April 23, 2015, 04:37:09 PM » |
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The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 4-22-2015
From The Federalist Patriot
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Earth Day, the EPA and Regulatory Tyranny
Liberty and Free Enterprise in the Balance
By Mark Alexander
Apr. 22, 2015
“I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce, and hold it as a truth, that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive and impolitic.” —James Madison (1789)
Three decades ago, our nation was emerging from the previous deep Democrat-induced recession. After his election in 1980, Ronald Reagan1 set about to implement free-enterprise economic policies to restart the world’s most powerful economic engine. In addition to those policies, President Reagan endeavored to unshackle the economy from “unjust, oppressive and impolitic” regulations, and the net result was the longest and strongest sustained period of economic growth in U.S. history.
One of the regulatory behemoths the Reagan administration reined in was the Environmental Protection Agency. Reagan was not an opponent of sound policies to encourage environmental conservation and preservation. In fact, he was an outdoorsman at heart and declared, “Preservation of our environment is not a liberal or conservative challenge, it’s common sense.” But he was a staunch foe of regulatory abuse as outlined in his Economic Bill of Rights2.
The EPA, which began as a seemingly well-intentioned 1970 regulatory proposal by Richard Nixon, has morphed into the most invasive regulatory agency ever created. Indeed, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Within a few years of its formation, the EPA’s first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, outlined the agency’s mandate declaring it had “a broad responsibility for research, standard-setting, monitoring and enforcement with regard to five environmental hazards; air and water pollution, solid waste disposal, radiation, and pesticides.”
The key words were “broad responsibility,” and the EPA’s mandate rapidly exceeded anything ever envisioned or authorized. Of course, that expansion is the “unintended consequence” of every agency established by Congress.
In the same year Nixon proposed the EPA, Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) initiated the first “Earth Day” as an annual “teach-in,” ostensibly about environmental conservation, but with the underlying motive of building support for EPA regulations to constrain the economy. (Nelson’s Earth Day co-founder, Ira Einhorn3, does not get mentioned much anymore after he murdered his ex-girlfriend and composted her remains in his closet.)
For the record, “conservation” is not a bad word; it shares the same root word as “conservative.” And my family makes every effort to wisely utilize energy and resources because the principle of “waste not, want not” is good practice.
However, the Left’s “Earth Day” political charade and the EPA’s regulatory tyranny prove far more insidious than just “conservation.” They leverage environmental concerns to conceal their real agenda — the constriction of free enterprise. Their objective is to incrementally implement centralized economic control through regulatory requirements justified by ever-expanding “mandates.”
It’s no coincidence that Nelson founded “Earth Day” on April 22, 1970, the centenary of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s birthday.
This year marks the 45th anniversary of the dawn of Earth Day and the EPA.
Despite the containment of EPA overreach during the 1980s, the agency and its leftist protagonists4 have now invaded virtually every area of our lives — from limiting our toilets to 1.6 gallons per flush to outlawing incandescent light bulbs, and countless other regulations that will ultimately ensure the death of Liberty by 10,000 cuts.
While regulation of toilet water and light bulbs may seem harmless enough, the EPA mandates associated with the so-called “climate change5” agenda are anything but. Recall that “climate change” was formerly referred to as “global warming,” for much the same reason that “progressive” was formally referred to as “liberal” — deceptive marketing.
Recall, too, that the grand potentate of the modern envirofascist movement was ignoble laureate Albert Arnold Gore6, who launched these hot-air histrionics with his 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.”
Gore has amassed a fortune through his shamelessly unscientific hucksterism and subsequent “green” investments, not to mention the $500 million sale of his Current TV network interest in 2013 to al-Qa'ida7, I mean Al Jazeera.
His bishopric of eco-theologists has amassed a large and growing cult of earth-worshiping Gorons, lemming-like adherents to his teachings on the end times ahead. Of course, Gore’s real agenda was no different than that of Nelson and his earlier Earth Day farce: Employ populist environmental demagoguery as cover for socialist economic centralization.
Christopher Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, aptly described Gore as “green on the outside, red to the core,” noting that his environmental concerns are a thinly veiled subterfuge for his socialist agenda.
While Albert Gore laid the foundation for this subterfuge, Barack Obama8 and the current leaders of his Socialist Democratic Party9 have masterfully united all global weather phenomena under one ubiquitous umbrella: “Climate Change.” And the new orthodoxy insists that warming, cooling, drenching, drying and all other variants of weather manifestations are the direct result of man-made carbon dioxide emissions, which must be regulated.
There’s no small irony in that regulatory claim, given humans emit CO2 during the process of respiration.
Given that spring has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, temperatures will rise in the months ahead, as will the overheated rhetoric about global warming — I mean “climate change.” |
