Are you for or against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency?

[The Mad Monk]

How did you get "do whatever they like" out of "moving the goalposts"?

[kentonio]

How did you get "do whatever they like" out of "moving the goalposts"?

Because I keep hearing the same crap about over regulation just because someone has an anecdote about some EPA guy misintepreting a rule or overstepping their authority. It's a huge agency, yes occasionally things will go wrong, but its become one of those crappy Tea Party/GOP shouting points that the EPA is this evil business destroying parasite that should be eliminated and it's complete bull****. All that slashing the EPA would do is return to a time when big business polluted the **** out of the country just to save a few bucks.

[Elok]

So what? How long are you guys going to buy into this tired old belief that some industries should be allowed to basically do whatever they like because then they might provide jobs? This is a large part of what has caused the whole OWS stuff. Big businesses will start new projects and will hire people simply because they want to make money. They are not going to suddenly stop trying to make money because you require them to be responsible about it. They'll grumble, and they'll ***** and then they'll do as they are told and continue trying to make money anyway.

KH is probably going to Xpost me with a rigorous post full of "you ****"s, but the argument as I understand it goes that any given business X has only a finite amount of free money to invest in itself--hiring new people or machinery or whatever. Sans EPA, they would freely spend the cash to do that whatever. With the EPA, they're never sure when a new reg is going to come out requiring them to install new polyoxychromide methylethylborazine scrubbers in all their plants, and if such a reg comes out just after they've spent their free cash adding a new line, they'll be grabbing their ankles. So they hold back on new investment, always keeping money handy "just in case." They're not going to stop trying to make money, no, but the fear of new regulations delays expansion.

With that said, I offer the disclaimer that I don't really understand economics at all, and have no dog in this fight--nor, for that matter, a real strong opinion one way or the other about the EPA. Just passing it on.

[The Mad Monk]

Elok pretty much nailed it.

[kentonio]

KH is probably going to Xpost me with a rigorous post full of "you ****"s, but the argument as I understand it goes that any given business X has only a finite amount of free money to invest in itself--hiring new people or machinery or whatever. Sans EPA, they would freely spend the cash to do that whatever. With the EPA, they're never sure when a new reg is going to come out requiring them to install new polyoxychromide methylethylborazine scrubbers in all their plants, and if such a reg comes out just after they've spent their free cash adding a new line, they'll be grabbing their ankles. So they hold back on new investment, always keeping money handy "just in case." They're not going to stop trying to make money, no, but the fear of new regulations delays expansion.

With that said, I offer the disclaimer that I don't really understand economics at all, and have no dog in this fight--nor, for that matter, a real strong opinion one way or the other about the EPA. Just passing it on.

The problem is that that line of argument is complete bull****. How long exactly is that company going to sit on cash on the off chance that they'll suddenly need it unexpectedly? For ever?

The reason I can confidently say that this is nonsense, is because we have equivilent agencies that are usually much more stringent that the US version, and companies over here continue to invest and expand and grow. We heard most of the same arguments at the time those regulations were being brought in, and they were shown to be untrue over the years.

[Elok]

I think the idea is that they're going to be constantly reserving a certain sum of cash just out of conservatism. They may expand, but they'll expand more slowly than they would have otherwise, because they're always holding back. Also, I think it's not the stringency that's troublesome so much as the inconsistency, that standards are constantly being revised, forcing overhaul after overhaul.

[kentonio]

I think the idea is that they're going to be constantly reserving a certain sum of cash just out of conservatism. They may expand, but they'll expand more slowly than they would have otherwise, because they're always holding back. Also, I think it's not the stringency that's troublesome so much as the inconsistency, that standards are constantly being revised, forcing overhaul after overhaul.

Same things business has always come out with whenever they are told they have to obey regulations. My main response would be 'who cares?'. We've already seen what happens when there isn't regulation, business can be trusted to do the right thing about as much as a crack addict can be trusted with the keys to a bank. As long as there is demand for a product or service, business will adapt. They'll just whine about it as long as they think theres a chance they can scare people into letting them get their own way.

[Lorizael]

Also, I think it's not the stringency that's troublesome so much as the inconsistency, that standards are constantly being revised, forcing overhaul after overhaul.

This is an indictment of our political system more than it is of the EPA.

[Elok]

Suppose you run an after-school nursery. The gummint wants to make sure you aren't employing pedophiles, so they make you install monitoring cameras on your facilities. A laudable goal, plus it's the law, so you go along. Two months later, they decide that you need to keep twice as much footage archived. You pay to update the equipment. Three weeks after that, in the aftermath of a tightly contested lawsuit, they insist you upgrade your cameras to HD so you can see exactly what an employee is doing with his hands from 200 yards away. So you do, wearily. Four months go by before they decide that you need a guy in the camera room at all times, with the ability to rewind and review instantly. You're putting in the last screw when they decide that the guy is some sort of coverup risk and make you take out all the stuff you just put in...

And that, I think, is what TMM was saying about the EPA.

[Elok]

I'm not saying don't regulate, I'm saying that I can see how continually changing standards could have companies pulling their hair out.

[kentonio]

Suppose you run an after-school nursery. The gummint wants to make sure you aren't employing pedophiles, so they make you install monitoring cameras on your facilities. A laudable goal, plus it's the law, so you go along. Two months later, they decide that you need to keep twice as much footage archived. You pay to update the equipment. Three weeks after that, in the aftermath of a tightly contested lawsuit, they insist you upgrade your cameras to HD so you can see exactly what an employee is doing with his hands from 200 yards away. So you do, wearily. Four months go by before they decide that you need a guy in the camera room at all times, with the ability to rewind and review instantly. You're putting in the last screw when they decide that the guy is some sort of coverup risk and make you take out all the stuff you just put in...

And that, I think, is what TMM was saying about the EPA.

I think that's what a lot of people are saying, trouble is that its complete overexaggerated nonsense.

*Cue someone providing an extreme anecdote..

[Elok]

Well, like I said, I don't actually have a dog in this fight. BTW, "overexaggerated"? What constitutes an acceptable degree of exaggeration?

[Hauldren Collider]

Kentonio, you really don't know **** do you? What exactly have you been fed about the free market? This concepts are well-understood and empirically provable.

You don't just approve of regulation, you approve of randomly changing regulation for the SOLE PURPOSE of ensuring companies have no clue exactly what the regulations are. And you think this helps the environment?

[kentonio]

Well, like I said, I don't actually have a dog in this fight. BTW, "overexaggerated"? What constitutes an acceptable degree of exaggeration?

I'd compare the anti-EPA level of exaggeration to calling Obama a marxist.

[kentonio]

Kentonio, you really don't know **** do you? What exactly have you been fed about the free market? This concepts are well-understood and empirically provable.

Except they aren't, because if you look outside your own little national borders at the rest of the damn world, you'd see all this stuff has been done before, and the horror stories big business feeds you about how it'll destroy the country are just bull****.

You don't just approve of regulation, you approve of randomly changing regulation for the SOLE PURPOSE of ensuring companies have no clue exactly what the regulations are. And you think this helps the environment?

Oh stop with the strawman crap, noones in favour of randomly changing regulations, the point I was making was that it just doesn't happen in the exaggerated way that people keep claiming. Yes sometimes regulations are badly implemented, and sometimes just badly written, but the answer to that is to carefully fix them, not to say 'This proves we shouldn't have regulation'.