Taxcutter
09-13-2012, 11:00 AM
If there is one agency that has been responsible for the decline of the US economy, it would have to be the EPA. This guy makes the case.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/316555/dethrone-epa-robert-zubrin#
quote:
“The EPA is today the primary enemy of economic growth in the United States…”
“From 1859 to 1971, the U.S. oil industry grew virtually continuously, in the process serving mightily to drive our economy and win our wars. But that growth was stopped dead in 1971, and sent into decline thereafter as the advent of the EPA and the accompanying National Environmental Policy Act…”
“…because of the de facto collusion of the EPA… OPEC has been able to operate as a highly effective cartel, imposing a massive and extremely regressive tax not only on America, but on the entire world economy…”
“Prior to 1971, the average time from groundbreaking to commencement of operation for a nuclear power plant was four years. For the most recently completed plants, it is 15 years. … This very costly fourfold increase has been imposed by the EPA and the National Environmental Policy Act. Under this law, nuclear-power projects have been subjected to constant delays caused by government bureaucrats’ capriciously changing engineering requirements in the middle of construction, as well by malevolent legal harassment by organizations whose openly stated objective is to wreck the nuclear industry by driving up its costs.”
“…for every one of these major outrages, the EPA acts in thousands of obscure cases to stifle or chill economic growth. Because “the environment” can be taken to include nearly everything, the EPA has arrogated to itself the right to control vast areas of American life. Rather than simply regulate emissions, it has chosen to control the design of automobiles and many other types of equipment, down to the subcomponent level, thereby preventing competition or improvement. It has caused millions of construction permits to be denied or delayed, on pretexts ranging from preserving imaginary wildlife migratory rest stops to halting suburban sprawl. It has prevented innumerable individuals from improving their own property, even when improvements — such as draining disease-spreading swamp puddles — are needed to protect public health and safety.”
“It has created mountains of unjustifiable, indecipherable, and fundamentally unknowable regulations, and imposed trillions of dollars in cumulative compliance and litigation costs on businesses of every description.”
“…the EPA has invented thousands of crimes, and there is not one person on this planet — not at the EPA, not at any law school or law firm, not at the Supreme Court — who knows what they all are.”
“The myriad EPA offenses are not confined to actual emissions or other physical activities in the real world; they also include compliance with EPA paperwork requirements, many of which are not merely hidden in the vast and confused tomes and files of ever-changing EPA jurisprudence, but encoded in unpublished internal memos, and which can even be changed and enforced retroactively.”
“The EPA gets away with it because rather than employing the actual U.S. court system, it has created its own internal system of “administrative courts (http://www.epa.gov/oalj/)” whose “judges” are employees of the EPA and subject to promotion, transfer, or discipline by the agency. Not surprisingly, these EPA courts find in favor of EPA prosecutors in nearly every case…”
“…the EPA process itself can take years, during which defendants’ property can remain confiscated, their liberty endangered, and their credit and businesses wrecked. As a result, most prefer to settle and submit.”
Taxcutter notes:
Don’t bother with your usual lying strawman arguments about burning rivers of dirty air. This is not suggesting we go back to the bad old days of JFK and LBJ. It is about bringing to heel a truly rogue agency.
The author offers some needed reforms.
Quote:
“1. The EPA’s extralegal system of puppet “administrative courts” must be abolished. Instead, the EPA must be required to pursue all actions through the real court system, where defendants will be afforded the right to a speedy and public trial by a real jury in front of a real judge and afforded all other aspects of due process, as prescribed by Amendments IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII of the United States Constitution.
2. The EPA must be forbidden to seize or destroy the property of any person until and unless such person has been found guilty of a crime in a court of law.
3. The EPA must be required to rewrite its current incoherent mass of confused regulations, amendments, findings, and memos into a single clear coherent, readable, and short code setting forth clear, justifiable, and attainable legal limits to pollutant emissions from stationary and mobile sources, with amendments to said code allowed only with the permission of Congress, and only at regularly scheduled intervals of no greater frequency than once per year; any such amendments must be incorporated into the code in such a way as to maintain its clarity. All EPA regulations, amendments, findings, memos, etc., outside this document must be declared null and void. Furthermore, the code must be restricted in its scope to setting forth limits on actual pollutant emissions; it must contain no assertion of authority over engineering design or other methods by which adherence to the code’s limits may be obtained.
4. The EPA code needs to set forth a clear, regular, and rational system of penalties for violations of its code, with the amount of the penalty set in proportion to the amount of pollutant released by a given defendant, and no penalties imposed in the absence of any pollutant released.
5. The EPA must be precluded from prosecuting anyone whose actions were legal at the time they were taken, or whose actions were taken on the advice or with the concurrence of the EPA.
6. The EPA must be constrained from asserting authority over how anyone other than the U.S. federal government may use, improve, or alter in any way his own land, buildings, vehicles, or other property, as per Amendment X to the United States Constitution.”
Taxcutter says:
None of these reforms cause the Cuyahoga river or Houston ship Channel to catch fire so just stow your predictable and false strawmen.
The reforms are there to make the EPA subject to the same restrictions the FBI is subject to and to get the nation’s economy going again.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/316555/dethrone-epa-robert-zubrin#
quote:
“The EPA is today the primary enemy of economic growth in the United States…”
“From 1859 to 1971, the U.S. oil industry grew virtually continuously, in the process serving mightily to drive our economy and win our wars. But that growth was stopped dead in 1971, and sent into decline thereafter as the advent of the EPA and the accompanying National Environmental Policy Act…”
“…because of the de facto collusion of the EPA… OPEC has been able to operate as a highly effective cartel, imposing a massive and extremely regressive tax not only on America, but on the entire world economy…”
“Prior to 1971, the average time from groundbreaking to commencement of operation for a nuclear power plant was four years. For the most recently completed plants, it is 15 years. … This very costly fourfold increase has been imposed by the EPA and the National Environmental Policy Act. Under this law, nuclear-power projects have been subjected to constant delays caused by government bureaucrats’ capriciously changing engineering requirements in the middle of construction, as well by malevolent legal harassment by organizations whose openly stated objective is to wreck the nuclear industry by driving up its costs.”
“…for every one of these major outrages, the EPA acts in thousands of obscure cases to stifle or chill economic growth. Because “the environment” can be taken to include nearly everything, the EPA has arrogated to itself the right to control vast areas of American life. Rather than simply regulate emissions, it has chosen to control the design of automobiles and many other types of equipment, down to the subcomponent level, thereby preventing competition or improvement. It has caused millions of construction permits to be denied or delayed, on pretexts ranging from preserving imaginary wildlife migratory rest stops to halting suburban sprawl. It has prevented innumerable individuals from improving their own property, even when improvements — such as draining disease-spreading swamp puddles — are needed to protect public health and safety.”
“It has created mountains of unjustifiable, indecipherable, and fundamentally unknowable regulations, and imposed trillions of dollars in cumulative compliance and litigation costs on businesses of every description.”
“…the EPA has invented thousands of crimes, and there is not one person on this planet — not at the EPA, not at any law school or law firm, not at the Supreme Court — who knows what they all are.”
“The myriad EPA offenses are not confined to actual emissions or other physical activities in the real world; they also include compliance with EPA paperwork requirements, many of which are not merely hidden in the vast and confused tomes and files of ever-changing EPA jurisprudence, but encoded in unpublished internal memos, and which can even be changed and enforced retroactively.”
“The EPA gets away with it because rather than employing the actual U.S. court system, it has created its own internal system of “administrative courts (http://www.epa.gov/oalj/)” whose “judges” are employees of the EPA and subject to promotion, transfer, or discipline by the agency. Not surprisingly, these EPA courts find in favor of EPA prosecutors in nearly every case…”
“…the EPA process itself can take years, during which defendants’ property can remain confiscated, their liberty endangered, and their credit and businesses wrecked. As a result, most prefer to settle and submit.”
Taxcutter notes:
Don’t bother with your usual lying strawman arguments about burning rivers of dirty air. This is not suggesting we go back to the bad old days of JFK and LBJ. It is about bringing to heel a truly rogue agency.
The author offers some needed reforms.
Quote:
“1. The EPA’s extralegal system of puppet “administrative courts” must be abolished. Instead, the EPA must be required to pursue all actions through the real court system, where defendants will be afforded the right to a speedy and public trial by a real jury in front of a real judge and afforded all other aspects of due process, as prescribed by Amendments IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII of the United States Constitution.
2. The EPA must be forbidden to seize or destroy the property of any person until and unless such person has been found guilty of a crime in a court of law.
3. The EPA must be required to rewrite its current incoherent mass of confused regulations, amendments, findings, and memos into a single clear coherent, readable, and short code setting forth clear, justifiable, and attainable legal limits to pollutant emissions from stationary and mobile sources, with amendments to said code allowed only with the permission of Congress, and only at regularly scheduled intervals of no greater frequency than once per year; any such amendments must be incorporated into the code in such a way as to maintain its clarity. All EPA regulations, amendments, findings, memos, etc., outside this document must be declared null and void. Furthermore, the code must be restricted in its scope to setting forth limits on actual pollutant emissions; it must contain no assertion of authority over engineering design or other methods by which adherence to the code’s limits may be obtained.
4. The EPA code needs to set forth a clear, regular, and rational system of penalties for violations of its code, with the amount of the penalty set in proportion to the amount of pollutant released by a given defendant, and no penalties imposed in the absence of any pollutant released.
5. The EPA must be precluded from prosecuting anyone whose actions were legal at the time they were taken, or whose actions were taken on the advice or with the concurrence of the EPA.
6. The EPA must be constrained from asserting authority over how anyone other than the U.S. federal government may use, improve, or alter in any way his own land, buildings, vehicles, or other property, as per Amendment X to the United States Constitution.”
Taxcutter says:
None of these reforms cause the Cuyahoga river or Houston ship Channel to catch fire so just stow your predictable and false strawmen.
The reforms are there to make the EPA subject to the same restrictions the FBI is subject to and to get the nation’s economy going again.