So, you say you want the government to take a more active role in fighting pollution?
Let's discuss the way the Environmental Protection Agency has dealt with the messy problem of sludge.
Sludge is sewage. It's the wastewater dregs from homes and businesses. It's the stuff nobody wants in their backyard – for understandable reasons.
A investigation by Insight magazine found the EPA, when confronted with a growing problem of what to do with sludge, came up with a creative solution.
The agency renamed sludge. It's now called, effective in 1993, "biosolids." And, guess what? It's good for you.
I'm not kidding.
The EPA now contends that sludge is great fertilizer. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. But renaming a formerly toxic hazard does not make it so. Was EPA lying before? Or is it lying now?
EPA says biosolids should be spread on farmland with reckless abandon. You see, the government had a problem it created itself. Congress passed more laws restricting the way individuals could use their land. Congress made more laws restricting the way businesses could dispose of sludge. Congress passed more laws forbidding the dumping of sludge in the oceans. So, what was the EPA to do with the nasty byproduct of all this legislation?
It renamed it. The EPA began promoting sludge as beneficial to the environment – and away went the problem.
Once again, I point this out to you as an example of how government does not and cannot solve real-life problems. Only individuals can. As more Americans turn their eyes to Washington for solutions to everyday problems, it is critically important to understand the way policy is made by the central government.
The truth is that government doesn't know any more than you or I know about the potential harmful effects of sludge.
But, when government says it is good, individuals like you and I lose our rights to object. We forfeit our rights to sue those who spread it on properties near us. We end any accountability we would have if someone in the private sector tried to do something to which we objected.
As I mentioned in a column just last week, the worst environmental disasters the world has ever known have been created by government. Yet, activists continue to push government to become more involved in finding solutions to problems that are most often created by government.
As Alan Keyes would ask, "Does this make sense?"
In the United States, the federal government prosecutes small private landowners for making sensible improvements on their own land. They are jailed, fined, ruined – all because some bureaucrat knows better.
Government is the real threat to the environment. It always has been. It always will be. How foolish for misguided environmentalists to turn to the mega-polluters for solutions.
If government truly wants to conserve the natural state of the environment, the best idea is to get out of the way. In the medical profession, the rule is "first do no harm." That ought to be the new credo for every lawmaker and every bureaucrat. But, instead, government operates under a "hypocritic oath." It destroys the environment in the name of preserving it. It uses its power to tie the hands of private property owners who want only the best for their land, while using command-and-control tactics and master plans that wreak havoc on the natural state.
This is an example of why the founders of America deliberately tied the hands of the central government in the Constitution.
But, I guess, until the biosolids really hit the fan, we're not going to realize just how smart those guys were. We're going to continue to centralize power in the hands of a few elitists in Washington – people who think they are smarter than us and can do no wrong.
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