December 7, 2005
Don’t spit, or you’ll create an EPA-protected wetland!
From Paul Jacob & Americans for Limited Government:
Kelo II: Better Luck This Time?
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear another case about a property owner targeted by the government. Michigan developer John Rapanos has been harassed by the state’s arm of the EPA since 1985 for developing his own land, after failing to get a wetland permit. There were a couple ponds on the land which the EPA said gave it jurisdiction over the property as a wetland.
After extracting hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, 200 hours of community service and three years of probation for allegedly criminal conduct, prosecutors have now hit him with $15 million in further penalties.
Rapanos says any EPA jurisdiction over “navigable waters” doesn’t extend to his property. The EPA says that because the water on his property was connected sooner or later to such waters, yes it does have jurisdiction. Basically, EPA is claiming regulatory jurisdiction over everything that has a drop of water that might end up somewhere else. I missed the part of the Constitution where it says property owners can be destroyed totally at any time by the whim and swampy logic-chopping of megalomaniacal bureaucrats.
You know, if this sort of institutional chutzpah were the exception, rather than the norm, in government, it might not be that bad. But let’s face it, this is how government works. Actually, it’s how every large institution works, even the corporate world. But in the corporate world, there are checks on this behavior.
Every manager/supervisor/VP in existence is usually trying to increase their own worth and value to a company (which translates into higher salary for themselves). The best way to do this is to grow. If you manage to expand your job description, and then need to hire another 3 staff below you to accomplish your new duties, your personal stock rises. Frequently this leads to infighting within companies as well. Two divisions of the same company might end up competing against each other for the same customer, leading to that customer getting a lower price. Is that the best thing for the company? Nope, but it’s the best thing for the sales team who wins. They gain a large benefit (as does the customer), but the cost to the company is distributed widely and mostly hidden.
At the same time, there are situations where a sales team sells product into a previously untapped market. In this case, the sales team wins, the company in general wins, and the customer wins, because they have a better situation than they had previously. Of course, the competing companies who might be trying to sell into the same market lose, but as they say, TANSTAAFL.
But that’s not what is happening here. The government determined that there was a benefit to certain levels of regulation, and that there was a necessary cost to that regulation. So they built a bureaucracy to regulate. The bureaucracy ran out of things to regulate, so they had to find more. After all, if the bureaucrats don’t find new, untapped markets, they’ll stop increasing their power, and if they’re not growing their power, people might ask if they’ve already got too much.
But with regulation, the normal rules of a market don’t apply. In a competitive, non-coercive market, people make mutually-beneficial transactions. While my company gaining a sale may hurt my competitor, it only does so because we are able to provide a cheaper or better product to the customer at a price we both believe is fair. In regulation, however, the regulating body is coercively setting the terms of behavior. “Mutual benefit” is not even a thought. When the regulators are trying as hard as they can to increase their own power, it quickly will also go beyond the wider benefit to society that originally spurred the regulation.
When regulation grows too large, the costs of the regulation are unfairly borne. The benefits of regulation do not extend to general society, but only to the increased power of the regulators. And it is even harder to stop, because that regulation is generally imbued with the feel-good mentality that spurred the original regulation. When regulation to clean up waterways is begun, it is usually because the waterways are conspicuously polluted. When that regulation is expanded far beyond its mandate, applying to waterways without any problem, the general public still thinks the regulating body is acting within its mission. And without any competing body to be a check on the power of that regulating body, the power just grows and grows.
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