Federal regulations are a giant barrier to entry for new and small businesses. They favor large corporations who can afford the regulatory burden. This is why they lobby congress to over regulate their own industry to stifle competition and ensure their own monopoly
Federal bureaucrats don't produce anything, but they are good at holding back others who want to be productive. We need a few regulations, but we don't need hundreds of thousands of them.
This makes a lot of sense. Most bureaucrats are nothing more than dead weight. They pretend to be important and necessary in order to justify their positions. Government is and always will be the great destructor in order to maintain power and control.
He should have said that methanol is required to be added to ethanol products so that they are not consumed to avoid the liquor tax. Methanol is poisonous, ethanol (drinking alcohol) is not in moderate doses.
I’m a free-market guy who believes that forced, government regulation is immoral and impractical. It destroys jobs. But 158 jobs per bureaucrat multiplied by the 300,000 bureaucrats (per the article) equals 47M jobs killed per year. Because there are only 168M jobs in the US (as of 2023) the 47M number seems far from believable.
“And, my personal favorite, the regulatory mandate to literally add poison -- ethanol -- to any alcohol that's not taxed, including mouthwash.”
This is a bit confusing. Would mouthwash not have alcohol (ethanol) in it but for the regulation? But then how would this regulation apply, since mouthwash would not otherwise have alcohol in it?
So we could have a lot more jobs if their were no regulations. Yes, no doubt. They also, no doubt, create barriers to entry for small entrepreneurs. The question becomes, does that mean regulations, in general, are evils that should be done away with?
Remember that before certain regulations were put into place, it's accepted knowledge now that certain activity by the banking industry contributed to the crash of 1929. The next really big crash occurred several years after some of those regulations, determined by TPTB to be unnecessarily onerous, were repealed.
Before these oh-so-stifling EPA regulations began to be enacted, rivers in Ohio used to catch on fire from the toxic chemicals that were being dumped into them by industries that, yes, kept a good deal of the population gainfully employed on living wages. Before DDT was banned and pesticides were regulated, the brown pelican, the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon were well on the way toward extinction.
Were those conditions I described better to have than these terrible evil regulations? Acknowledge what regulations have given us that are crucial to our collective well-being if you're going to describe also the evils they can cause. Then you will be painting a picture that corresponds to reality and we can, in an informed way, fix the things that are wrong without simply exchanging them for another, possibly worse, set of wrongs.
“In fact, you could fire him, keep paying him for life, and still put a hundred families in the middle class.”
.
And this will be the terrain of the coming political battle. In our modern mixed economy in which nearly every sector of that economy is in some way, directly or indirectly, dependent on government jobs, largesse, subsidies, and legislative preferences, can we muster the critical mass to dismantle the welfare state? I don’t know too many people who are willing to solely remove their head from the government trough as a matter of principle. Will Elon Musk make the first move by disavowing all manner of government subsidies for his “free enterprises?” More to the point, will the middle class engineers whose jobs depend on funding a trip to Mars favor cuts to a program that otherwise satisfies no natural demand in a free market? The problem is that everyone wants to raise taxes on anyone that makes a dollar more than they do and then cut all government entitlements except for the ones that they enjoy. Therefore, if we can be honest about the depth of hypocrisy while still acknowledging the dangers of standing on a sinking ship in which everyone waits for the next guy to pick up a bucket and start bailing, I must ask everyone in this forum: “would you accept a compromise that, in effect, dismantles all these regulatory jobs by attrition only (i.e., not renewing the positions or even providing something akin to a corporate “golden parachute” to shut it all down ASAP) if that is the only *political* means to achieve your goal of restoring a free market? Incidentally, this mirrors the same conundrum with illegal migration: Deport everyone and risk the fate of the Republican Party in California (now in its 4th decade in the wilderness after its principled yet misguided efforts against lawless immigration and its consequences), or build a wall while providing some mechanism for illegals now here to become normalized? I don’t have the answers, I’m just making sure everyone understands the bigger questions.
I’ve run research labs focused on industrial polymer chemistry. But in all my time in chem labs, I’ve always stressed it’s the dose, not the compound, that kills. Water, salt, and calcium are all essential to life. But each can also kill you given in excessive quantity. There’s no such thing a toxin, just toxic amounts. That applies quite well to ethanol. BELLE (beneficial effects of low level exposure)is a tragically under researched area of scientific inquiry. Many of the worst things ever can do unexpectedly good things but for the right dose. But once a gov regulator prohibits something, any further study endangers western civilization. And your grant money. And your career. Science however has never been a consensus activity.
I clearly recall my Organic Chemistry professor teaching that all alcohols are toxic, though ethanol is the least toxic. If 800 ppm blood ethanol is sufficient to impair driving, yeah that’s a small amount.
Federal regulations are a giant barrier to entry for new and small businesses. They favor large corporations who can afford the regulatory burden. This is why they lobby congress to over regulate their own industry to stifle competition and ensure their own monopoly
https://open.substack.com/pub/dehartmedia/p/the-4th-branch-of-government?r=jpnkq&utm_medium=ios
Federal bureaucrats don't produce anything, but they are good at holding back others who want to be productive. We need a few regulations, but we don't need hundreds of thousands of them.
This makes a lot of sense. Most bureaucrats are nothing more than dead weight. They pretend to be important and necessary in order to justify their positions. Government is and always will be the great destructor in order to maintain power and control.
The Phd isn’t in Chemistry…
Get the regulation-removal right and there's an excellent chance we won't need tort reform.
No, scratch that, we still need tort reform.
This is a brilliant and incredibly important post. But you lost me with the requirement to add ethanol (alcohol) to untaxed alcohol🤔
He should have said that methanol is required to be added to ethanol products so that they are not consumed to avoid the liquor tax. Methanol is poisonous, ethanol (drinking alcohol) is not in moderate doses.
I am curious about that too.
I’m a free-market guy who believes that forced, government regulation is immoral and impractical. It destroys jobs. But 158 jobs per bureaucrat multiplied by the 300,000 bureaucrats (per the article) equals 47M jobs killed per year. Because there are only 168M jobs in the US (as of 2023) the 47M number seems far from believable.
Imagine if the EPA would lose its grip on the water conservation act? You would actually be able to take a nice shower in a hotel again
DOGE can probably fire 50% of the federal workers and no one would notice.
One of the best articles you’ve written.
“And, my personal favorite, the regulatory mandate to literally add poison -- ethanol -- to any alcohol that's not taxed, including mouthwash.”
This is a bit confusing. Would mouthwash not have alcohol (ethanol) in it but for the regulation? But then how would this regulation apply, since mouthwash would not otherwise have alcohol in it?
So we could have a lot more jobs if their were no regulations. Yes, no doubt. They also, no doubt, create barriers to entry for small entrepreneurs. The question becomes, does that mean regulations, in general, are evils that should be done away with?
Remember that before certain regulations were put into place, it's accepted knowledge now that certain activity by the banking industry contributed to the crash of 1929. The next really big crash occurred several years after some of those regulations, determined by TPTB to be unnecessarily onerous, were repealed.
Before these oh-so-stifling EPA regulations began to be enacted, rivers in Ohio used to catch on fire from the toxic chemicals that were being dumped into them by industries that, yes, kept a good deal of the population gainfully employed on living wages. Before DDT was banned and pesticides were regulated, the brown pelican, the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon were well on the way toward extinction.
Were those conditions I described better to have than these terrible evil regulations? Acknowledge what regulations have given us that are crucial to our collective well-being if you're going to describe also the evils they can cause. Then you will be painting a picture that corresponds to reality and we can, in an informed way, fix the things that are wrong without simply exchanging them for another, possibly worse, set of wrongs.
No hope. I pray for Putin to NUKE DC, cut off the head of the snake.
Here’s one of his sources:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2963287
“In fact, you could fire him, keep paying him for life, and still put a hundred families in the middle class.”
.
And this will be the terrain of the coming political battle. In our modern mixed economy in which nearly every sector of that economy is in some way, directly or indirectly, dependent on government jobs, largesse, subsidies, and legislative preferences, can we muster the critical mass to dismantle the welfare state? I don’t know too many people who are willing to solely remove their head from the government trough as a matter of principle. Will Elon Musk make the first move by disavowing all manner of government subsidies for his “free enterprises?” More to the point, will the middle class engineers whose jobs depend on funding a trip to Mars favor cuts to a program that otherwise satisfies no natural demand in a free market? The problem is that everyone wants to raise taxes on anyone that makes a dollar more than they do and then cut all government entitlements except for the ones that they enjoy. Therefore, if we can be honest about the depth of hypocrisy while still acknowledging the dangers of standing on a sinking ship in which everyone waits for the next guy to pick up a bucket and start bailing, I must ask everyone in this forum: “would you accept a compromise that, in effect, dismantles all these regulatory jobs by attrition only (i.e., not renewing the positions or even providing something akin to a corporate “golden parachute” to shut it all down ASAP) if that is the only *political* means to achieve your goal of restoring a free market? Incidentally, this mirrors the same conundrum with illegal migration: Deport everyone and risk the fate of the Republican Party in California (now in its 4th decade in the wilderness after its principled yet misguided efforts against lawless immigration and its consequences), or build a wall while providing some mechanism for illegals now here to become normalized? I don’t have the answers, I’m just making sure everyone understands the bigger questions.
This is important: ethanol is NOT poisonous in small amounts. Did you confuse it with Methanol which is indeed poison even in small amounts?
I’ve run research labs focused on industrial polymer chemistry. But in all my time in chem labs, I’ve always stressed it’s the dose, not the compound, that kills. Water, salt, and calcium are all essential to life. But each can also kill you given in excessive quantity. There’s no such thing a toxin, just toxic amounts. That applies quite well to ethanol. BELLE (beneficial effects of low level exposure)is a tragically under researched area of scientific inquiry. Many of the worst things ever can do unexpectedly good things but for the right dose. But once a gov regulator prohibits something, any further study endangers western civilization. And your grant money. And your career. Science however has never been a consensus activity.
I clearly recall my Organic Chemistry professor teaching that all alcohols are toxic, though ethanol is the least toxic. If 800 ppm blood ethanol is sufficient to impair driving, yeah that’s a small amount.