The halfway point (to oblivion)
Believe it or not, we're still here. So are a lot of others who are inside the Beltway for the duration.
On Friday America will reach the halfway point of Joe Biden’s term. In and of itself, the main significance is only that the passage of the midpoint would allow Kamala Harris to serve out the remainder of Biden’s term and run for re-election twice instead of just once. The cold reality, though, is that she probably couldn’t even win as an incumbent; regardless, this will be a milestone of sorts.
I probably don’t reference my “other” writing jobs as much as I should, but part of the inspiration for this piece was derived from my contribution this week to The Patriot Post, as I wrote about the idea of a gas stove ban. It’s not as far off as you think, though: according to a chart kept by the Building Decarbonization Coalition, 99 cities and four states (California, Colorado, Maryland, and Washington state) have some sort of ordinance in place to at least encourage “zero emission buildings,” part of which is a prohibition on gas appliances. (Of course, the BDC is looking for more. People with sanity are looking for fewer.)
But it’s one thing to do this in a town or city where the populations are more or less homogenous in a political sense and thus are such that bright ideas such as a gas stove ban pass with hardly a whisper of protest. But once you get to a state and federal level, these feelgood proposals are harder to implement. Enter the bureaucrats.
Because legislation is now written in as broadly as possible - imagine what lurks inside the 4,000+ page omnibus spending bill the lame duck Democrat-controlled Congress passed just before beating it out of town for the holidays and the annals of history - the ones who implement it now are the bureaucrats who make their living writing regulations to conform. At a federal level, we’ve had so much legislation of wide scope put in place over the last half-century or so that there’s justification somewhere for whatever they cook up, and only rarely does a court step in to say they’re taking things too far.
Let’s take the example of energy conservation, part of which I alluded to at the tail end of my Patriot Post piece. When the ethanol carveout was put in place in the mid-aughts, it was billed as a way to extend the oil supply that was getting more and more expensive and more and more imported. But a few years’ worth of technology gains and exploration later, we were awash in oil to the point where we honestly didn’t need the Renewable Fuel Standard anymore. But bureaucrats weren’t going to take it upon themselves to move with the market (unfortunately, neither were politicians who didn’t want to get a batch of Iowa corn farmers pissed off at them.) Fifteen years later, we’re still stuck with these regulations, which the Biden administration is going to make even more detrimental to our poultry growers, energy industry, and the economy in general.
Now it can be argued that regulation sometimes breeds innovation. Another piece of the energy conservation puzzle that government attempted to solve was that of all but scrapping the incandescent light bulb in favor of those curlicue compact fluorescent things nobody ever liked. We were saddled with them for about a decade, but in the last few years the LED bulb technology has blossomed to a point where we get better, more adjustable lighting that uses a fraction of the electricity. (We seldom specify anything else in our projects, since LED lights make passing COMchecks for lighting a breeze. I’m sure the next edition of the building codes will tighten this up.)
As far as the gas stove controversy goes, there are those who argue that induction cooktops have the advantages of gas stoves (better heat control) but obviously don’t have the open flame or natural gas connection. I will freely admit “I am not a cook!” so I couldn’t say whether this contention is true or not, just that it could well be another case where regulation was the mother of invention. But it’s not supposed to work that way.
My overall point is this: we elect lawmakers to make laws for us, not to defer the actual authority to some faceless bureaucrat like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who as it turned out made a tremendous living off the backs of the taxpayers by eventually becoming the highest-paid government employee. (Dr. Fauci had plenty of time to accrue this, having joined the government directly upon concluding his residency way back in 1968.) Fauci is an extreme example, but how many others are out there working toward their 30 years in and no desire to lose their government sinecure and its benefits once government is rightsized? What better way is there for them to feel important than to tell those hayseeds out in the hinterlands how they have to live? It’s easy to forget what things are like out there when you’ve drawn a government check your whole life.
We talk about term limits for politicians all the time, but they’re really not the ones doing the damage. Nor are all the clueless people Joe Biden has placed in their government and Cabinet positions, even though they draw the headlines. They still labor at the president’s request, and once the president who appointed them is gone (hopefully in two years hence) they’re shown the door too.
No, the problem is much deeper. Your endangered gas stove is the proof because NO politician would ever vote to take it away, so they cede that dirty work to those who can’t and won’t lose their cushy government jobs. Until that system is changed, we can only hold so many people accountable.