The Cost of Imbalance

Several years back I had a young friend who had a business of collecting empty clam shells and delivering them to people for paving their driveways. Somehow or another he came under the watchful eye of New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which decided that his activity was harmful to the environment and they put him out of business.
It could be that in some way what he was doing to feed his family was harmful. The long and short of it is, a family was impacted and a job was lost. It could be that there was good science behind their decision, and it was necessary for our collective good…but based upon what I have seen of their work, I am more than a little skeptical.
Most employment in America is by small businesses. It is the result of people seeing opportunities and investing their time and money in making a go of them. While everybody wants a clean environment, they also want a job. As states and a nation, we have come to the point where our environmental agencies have gained so much power that business is having a difficult time complying with their regulations.
Let me move from clam shells to energy. We often compare ourselves to China, and wonder why they are advancing so quickly. One thing is, they recognize their need for lots of inexpensive energy and among other things, are developing hydro-electric power.
On the other hand, what are we doing? Per the New York Times, we are demolishing two massive hydroelectric dams on the Elwha River because they block the salmon from swimming upstream. Not only are we not enlarging our industrial foundation as our growing population requires, we are undoing the infrastructure on which our standard of living is based.
We need to give a lot of thought to energy. America is blessed with massive energy-creating resources. Between oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind and solar sources, we do not need to send one single dollar to foreigners. But instead, we send hundreds of billions of dollars annually out of the country for fuel, and with those dollars go millions of jobs.
Why? One, we lack a national energy plan to both insure we have plenty for the future, and to make us energy independent. Two, we have environmental bureaucrats who lack understanding of what makes an economy work. While the things they want to achieve probably have value, they don’t understand the consequences their decisions have on the economy and job creation; or worse, don’t care.
What is the cost of the imbalance of our need for gainful employment and our respect for the environment? Answer: a diminished standard of living and fewer jobs. While recessions cannot be avoided, the weak recovery from this one may be all the recovery we get. This is due to our governmental policies, per the speculation of U. of Chicago’s Bob Lucas. He says that recessions are generally not important events, but that this one has unnecessarily taken 10 percent off of our long-term growth trend.
English historian Paul Johnson states in his book, “A History of the American People,” that the low cost of government was a factor in causing our nation to grow from nothing to a world power. America needs to get back to what made her prosperous: a nation based upon law and morality, not over-regulation. In adding immensely to the number of government regulators (the US Department of Environmental Protection’s budget was increased by $3 billion last year), we have added immensely to the cost of government, but not altered miscreants’ bad behavior.
Going forward, let us downsize our bureaucracy; let us balance job creation with environmental needs, let our laws require a clean environment, and let there be sufficient consequences for breaking them.
Art Hall, publisher