Scott Pruitt as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has opened up the dark reality and truths about government agencies and regulations. The EPA had been weaponized almost since its founding in December of 1970, after President Richard Nixon signed an executive order. Congress was not convened nor have even an advisory participation in the forming of this agency which makes it vulnerable as if it was formed by an executive order, it could be dismantled by an executive order. What has been found by Scott Pruitt since taking the mantle of heading the EPA is that they had been using tainted science and cherry picked data to form their regulations. The EPA had actually paid scientists to test and make models to produce the results as dictated in their given premise. They would tell the scientists what regulations they desired to have data ensure would be required as a result of their study into carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels threatened the health or pertaining to fine particulate pollution. There not only was no allowance for peer review but much of the EPA research was classified such that it could not be viewed by the public or even other scientists. So the EPA was refusing to release the data and research, studies, methodologies or findings of the research they were funding while also giving grants only to those scientists who were attempting to prove the exact findings the EPA required to enact further regulations and restrictions on traditional fossil fuels and carbon based energy as well as restriction on chemical fertilizers forcing more and more switching to expensive, intermittent, unreliable wind and solar energy installations and other unsustainable sources of energy and even fertilizers.
The EPA sins are not the only item that the people need be concerned about, one should also make an impartial examination of regulations in general. Has anybody ever honestly thought about where regulations come from? There are two means by which regulations can originate, one pernicious and the other even worse. The less harmful versions are a result of legislation passed by the Congress. Do not allow this to give you the wrongheaded idea that this means that the Congress had any oversight of such regulations as they are generated by legislation, but not limited or reviewed by Congress. When a piece of legislation is passed and signed by the President, making it a law, often will have as part of the legislation language which instructs separate departments to write the necessary regulations to accomplish the concepts defined in the legislation and to request other departments to also make regulations should they see such a need from the legislation. This means that once the legislation is passed into law, the numerous different departments will write regulations to enact what they see as the demands of the legislation as found to be necessary. They can also ask other departments other than the initial ones designated by the legislation to have an opportunity to make input and possibly add regulations they feel are required. These regulations carry the same effect and weight as law as they are driven by legislation and that gives them their presumed legal backing. Then there is another set of regulation which are driven by the departments themselves as required for the department to fulfill their directives which define their reason for existing. These regulations are simply generated by the perceived reason that the agency was formed. These regulations are simply the concepts of bureaucrats purely from their fertile minds and imaginations which they believe are necessary as the reason for their agency’s existence. They require no legislation and get no oversight by Congress or anyone else; they are simply generated by the bureaucrats at each agency. These are the type the EPA has been generating since its inception. The EPA had even gone one-step further by backing their regulatory desires by hiring scientists who are willing to do research reaching the desired results desired by the regulatory bureaucrats of the EPA. Now Scott Pruitt is demanding that the EPA bureaucrats have the results they receive from often the same scientist time after time to now have their results tested by open peer review. This means that scientists who may not agree with the results desired by the EPA bureaucrats are going to repeat the research and experiments of the regular EPS hired scientists to see if they get the same results. This apparently has frightened, even panicked, the EPA regulators and their friendly same neighborhood scientists as their little secret is very probably going to be brought out into the light of day. This is particularly a problem as the EPA had been working to formulate regulations in order to force coal use into bankruptcy in order to close down all electrical energy which used coal and had showed intent to then go after oil powered plants forcing almost all electricity to be generated by green energy sources alone such as wind, solar and geothermal.
So what are the real purposes of regulations? They are to define the desired results of legislation or to fulfill the reason for the establishment of the agency. They are intended to fulfill the legal needs basically of the government. But regulations have another use in establishing the necessity of each agency and to provide reasons for the agency budget and to be able to demand further funding and increased funding. The problem is they are also used by each person at each agency to justify their employment and to establish the domain of or the establishment of a group to address a domain as defined by regulations. Once you have your little fiefdom, then it will need to generate more regulations which they will enforce and even enforcement will require them to add additional regulations making their governance over their fiefdom more established and thus perpetuate any need for their group, their fiefdom. Imagine if your employment required that you generate rules which other people, companies, businesses, institutions or governments were going to have to follow and you were not required to give any deep reasoning or required to have scientists to validate your ideas; scientists who are basically dependent upon you and your fellow workers for grant monies, funding and salaries, and the more of these rules you produced would be met with rewards and good job reviews and faster promotions. This is the situation of a large number of Federal Government employees in the large buildings in Washington D.C. (and now some out in the suburbs and even in West Virginia) who have taken to generating unnecessary and even counterproductive regulations just because it will serve their job reviews and they see their position as their justification is their formulating new regulations. Their claim is that they are protecting the people from evils of big businesses or to save people from themselves and making our society more fair, safe and protected. They will claim that many regulations are there to prevent people from doing things which could produce harmful results and by having regulations against these acts, they are preventing such activity from occurring in our society.
So these regulations will protect us from dangerous activities, dangerous people, dangerous scientists going out to make some monsters or big business from producing products which might be dangerous and could result in people being hurt of even being killed by these products. Imagine any company which manufactured a product which would necessarily result in any user ending up dead. How long would such a company be able of surviving? Two lawsuits, three lawsuits, or what and why would any company make such a product expecting on remaining in business. Businesses are not going to produce products which through being defective of through proper use which will result in murdering their customers with very few exceptions. We will hear about the tobacco companies which when they were initially formed did not know of the link between smoking and cancer and other diseases. The alcohol industry warns against drinking too much and getting drunk, let alone getting drunk regularly. The interesting thing is smoking and drinking in moderation, possibly extreme moderation, has been found to have some advantages for a person’s health. But manufacturers generally do not make products which will kill their users. Imagine an electric shaver which would probably slice the user’s throat within six weeks of use, would they sell any more shavers after about six months when the word got out that all those using this shaver died from a defect? Manufacturers do not win by making products which are not safe and adding required levels of testing or safeguards upon safeguards such that an infant crawling up the wall and getting the product down from a shelf and then plugging it in and turning it on the infant could not be harmed is ridiculous, but there are such types of regulations to foolproof products. Lawsuits have moderated manufacturers’ carefulness and warning labels far more than have regulations. There is something that regulations do make every manufacturer do; they have had to raise their prices. Higher prices and less competition are the main two results of regulations. Often regulations are produced to make new companies getting into a business more onerous thus protecting the existing companies. One such is the requirement in most major cities is to have a certificate to operate a taxi company. These are the most onerous requirement which prevents others from breaking into this fairly lucrative business in most cities. This was also why Taxi companies attempted in these cities to force anyone responding to UBER and the other ride-share apps to have to have a certificate as if they were an actual taxi service. Some of these cases ended up in the courts as the taxi companies did not like having this type of competition.
Creatures from the Laboratory of Dr. Moreau
The other reason given for regulations is to prevent people from doing certain activities. One of our favorites is the idea that if scientists were not kept curbed from certain areas of research, then we would end up with some scientists going out into dangerous regions of science and we could end up with a Dr. Moreau and his hideous creations. First, does anybody honestly expect that such experimentation would be performed by any reasonable scientist? And if a scientist was twisted enough to do such experiments, would regulators honestly actually have any preventive powers on such a twisted mind? The problem with the idea that regulations prevent people from performing dangerous and harmful actions is that people who are going to do things which by any reasonable mind would be illegal and dangerous, regulations are not going to prevent their actions. There are laws against robbing banks, yet people still rob banks. There are laws against killing people yet murder still happens every day in some city. In cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and other it is illegal to have a weapon within the city limits yet Chicago has had one-hundred-thirty-seven gun homicides as of April 22, 2018. What if the guns have been pretty much removed from a society such as in London? Well, London has had a rising homicide rate in 2018 with stabbings being the problem so much so that knife control laws have been demanded, the step beyond total gun control will be blade control. Regulations and laws will never prevent criminal elements from acts which are against the health and safety of the community; criminal acts are the proof that regulations and laws are not sufficient. There is but one way that evil will end, that is when the human spirit is able to find the satisfaction it requires from a gentler and calm forms of excitement, when the human desire for entertainment is satisfied through actions which are not harmful to the community. This will also mean no wars, no murders, no theft, no unfulfilled desires and this will only be realized with the arrival of the Messiah. For those who do not believe in the divine or the coming of a Messiah, then it will come when the human spirit has found the path to completeness, something which many believe is not possible, but perhaps with the evolution of society and the people within, such might be brought within reach. Until then, laws and regulations will probably be required, but let us at least have regulations based upon truth and good science and not simply responding to personal biases. We can only hope that is not too much to ask, but it appears it is.
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 
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