For the past 20 years, I have advised landowners, homebuilders and energy companies on the intricacies of the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. Both are complex statutes supplemented by dense volumes of regulations and administered by confusing agencies that have state and local counterparts applying state and local versions of the similar laws and rules.
The costs of these regulatory regimes are enormous, but dimly, if at all, understood by the public. The highest-sounding rhetoric surrounds both laws, but, even as they accomplish important environmental goals, they also operate to batter tens of thousands of Americans every year.
The Consumer Products Safety Improvements Act of 2008 (CPSIA) is another example of legislative good intentions gone horribly wrong. When Congress, in a burst of misguided zeal, passed impossible-to-meet production standards impacting thousands of products sold to children, it unleashed a steamroller of new rules on American businesses small and large.
As a consequence, hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory — children’s bikes, teething rings, etc. — were obliged to be pulled from shelves and permanently put in a warehouse or destroyed.
Neither these environmental statutes nor the CPSIA fiasco will seem much of a problem if either the cap-and-tax legislation that passed the House by eight votes Friday or the similarly radical proposals concerning American medicine pending on both sides of the Capitol make it out of this Congress by fall 2010.
This is by far the most radical Congress in modern American history, recklessly running up gargantuan deficits and blasting out thousands of pages of new laws that its members have not read — laws that will birth tens of thousands of new pages of rules that as-yet-not-created agencies will be applying to every American and every American business.
Like the environmental and consumer products laws of the past generation, the cap-and-tax and health care laws will require legions of lawyers to interpret and apply, and a mountain range of taxes, fees and fines to finance.
Not just the prices of houses and kids’ stuff will rise as a result. The prices of everything using energy will skyrocket, and medicine will grow so expensive that it will have to be rationed, though quietly . . .
