CIVIL DEFENSE PERSPECTIVES
March 1998 (vol. 14, #3) 1601 N Tucson Blvd #9, Tucson AZ 85716 c 1998 Physicians for Civil Defense
REGULATION AND LIFE
Regulation is a benign-sounding concept, and in fact natural regulation is a necessity for all life. When one of the numerous feedback loops in the body goes awry, disease or even death results. Diabetes is one obvious example. The effect of stimulation unbalanced by inhibition is striking in many neurological conditions, such as Huntington's chorea.
In the biosphere, when the ``balance of nature'' is upset
- whether by disease, natural climatic change, removal or introduction of predators, or other human activity (say overgrazing)-homeostasis is soon reestablished through natural regulatory processes (though the new balance may seem less desirable).Voluntary human action
-also called a market economy- has regulators too, the most important one being the price of various goods and services. Prices are signals of the value that human beings place on various things. When prices are allowed to fluctuate freely, supply and demand are brought into equilibrium. Neither shortages nor gluts last very long.The regulatory mechanism for government is called ``checks and balances.'' Recognizing the inevitable hazards of government power, the American Founders set up three independent branches, each of which could check the power of the others.
Now, the United States is trying a very hazardous experiment: granting increasingly broad powers to a fourth branch of government, which effectively has uncontrolled legislative, executive, and judicial functions all rolled into one. It is even more dangerous when that authority is an international one.
While these powers may be called ``regulatory,'' they have little in common with natural feedback mechanisms. The powers are vested in a bureaucracy that enjoys sovereign immunity and has no accountability to an electorate. Legislators and courts are increasingly reluctant to intervene
-especially when the regulatory rationale is the protection of public health and safety.It is increasingly clear that regulation has become a euphemism for rationing, and Newspeak for naked, unbridled power.
The agenda and modus operandi of federal regulators is clearly outlined in a memorandum prepared by the Dept. of Justice for the Clinton Health Care Task Force:
``Past systems of wage and price controls have been designed to assure that transactions take place at a reasonable price, rather than to prevent certain transactions from taking place at all. A health care system that imposes a cap on total costs could operate...to prevent certain types of medical treatment from taking place at all....Where the treatment sought is medically necessary
-and particularly where a life-threatening condition is involved-it is entirely possible that the courts would impose some constitutional limits on the Government's ability to impose, for economic reasons, restrictions on a patient's ability to obtain treatment for which he or she is willing to pay.''The memorandum proceeded to explain mechanisms to circumvent that difficulty
-which can be adapted to other types of controls and other areas of the economy (which may be less protected than life-saving medical treatment). One method is the ``public-private partnership'' (how about with the ``NGOs'' favored by the UN?): ``The Supreme Court has allowed private entities to become very heavily involved in federal regulatory schemes without becoming governmental actors subject to due process restrictions.''The same memorandum refers to the Clean Air Act as a sample of a ``cooperative federalism scheme'' under which the federal government implements a statute if a state fails to do so under a federally approved plan. This is the Act being used as the basis for severe restrictions on all manner of economic activity, in order to regulate ``pollution'' due to particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5s). It is also the ``Clean Air Act'' that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants to use as a mechanism for implementing the as-yet-unratified Kyoto ``global warming'' treaty.
The government wants to place bureaucratically determined ``caps'' on medical services; on particulate emissions (and on the farming, construction, gardening, motor vehicles, and industry that produce them); and on carbon dioxide (the building block of all life having been redefined as a ``pollutant'').
The rationale is the same for each: a health crisis. Uninsured Americans; fine particles said to cause ``up to 60,000'' American deaths per year; and mild temperature increases, which will be amplified by atmospheric and oceanic feedback mechanisms to cause diverse catastrophes, from the melting of the Arctic icecap to the freezing of Europe to malaria outbreaks.
The dire predictions are supposedly backed up by ``consensus'': the agreement of the selected experts invited to participate in the Health Care Task Force; EPA scientists; and allegedly all but 20 or so scientists (who must be ``shills for big oil'' or they wouldn't question Global Warming).
In fact, most physicians do not agree that America is having a health care crisis. Not even the EPA's own scientific panel gave an unqualified endorsement of its new particulate regulations. And the myth of a scientific consensus about global warming is being exploded by the Petition Project described in the March, 1998, issue of Access to Energy. Despite the more than $2 billion spent to produce support for global climate catastrophe, the consensus appears to be against it.
The responsibility for the manufactured crises is no longer assigned to Big Industry alone, but to Everyone. Enforcement, according to a $1.9 billion Clinton proposal, would permit criminal prosecution of anyone who even ``attempts'' to commit an ``environmental crime,'' even inadvertently.
As to accountability for counterproductive regulations or botched enforcement, there essentially is none. Moreover, in contrast to the flexible regulatory mechanisms of living things, bureaucrats themselves are bound by iron rules that they cannot bend just because the strictures may be stupid and unjust.
Proponents of the regulatory regime routinely portray the cost of compliance as minimal (Clinton claims Kyoto will cost the average household between $70 and $110 per year) and the cost of noncompliance as the extinction of life on earth.
The economic costs, however high (see p. 2), are not the most important ones. Caps on medical services, economic activity, and energy use are caps on life itself, especially human life. This is the underlying theme of seemingly unrelated crisis responses. As environmentalists' own words show, the overarching goal is unregulated government and death.