(bolding mine)
The irony here is just too much.
Do you not realize you are arguing AGAINST the criminal justice system? While trying to argue infavour of a regulatory system. All of which simply represents your opinion of two systems you obviously don’t understand.
When come back, try to use something more original than “when come back.”
Would you prefer a wiki link?
This line of attack is pretty weak, I expect it from CannyDan, but you’re better than this. David42 presented a cite to back up his claim, unfortunately in book for where it’s a lot harder to link to relevant sections, something we’ve gotten lazy with on an internet message board that relies too heavily on questionable wiki content. One thing interesting from that page:
Creating special health courts. Common Good’s health court proposal, developed in a joint venture with the Harvard School of Public Health (and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation),[11] is intended to bring reliability to medical justice,[12] thereby avoiding the waste caused by “defensive medicine” and repairing the culture of distrust between providers and patients that impedes the open interaction needed for safe, effective care. Health courts would have judges dedicated full-time to resolving health care disputes. The judges would make written rulings to provide guidance on proper standards of care. These rulings would set precedents on which both doctors and patients could rely. The health court concept is supported by a broad spectrum of health care constituents, including the American Medical Association,[13] AARP,[14] and patient safety experts.[15] It is vigorously opposed by trial lawyers, however, who say the proposal would limit the right to sue. In March 2010, President Barack Obama sent a letter to Congress stating that he would support health court pilot projects.[16]
Well, emacknight, I have remembered that the purpose of debate isn’t to convince your opponent but to convince the audience.
I may have been waiting for CannyDan to discuss Mr. Howard’s book, but since he won’t, other than some kind of “this-book-don’t count-cause-it’s-for-sale” argument, for the benefit of any lurking audience that we know is out there, I’m gonna gather some stuff for the audience to look at.
I’m gonna start with this:
the thinking here goes:
Oil spills are dangerous, we should stop oil spills. Rules are written by an agency (EPA) with an objective of lowering the number, or eliminating oil spills. Someone realizes that Milk has (another kind of) oil in it. Since Milk therefore is an environmental hazard, the people need protected from (entirely imaginary) milk floods contaminating our environment.
“In January of this year, the EPA finalized a rule subjecting dairy producers to the Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure program, a program designed to prevent offshore oil spills (WSJ, “Land of Milk and Regulation,” 1/27/11). Because milk contains some animal fat, which the EPA classifies as a “non-petroleum oil,” it now claims authority to force dairies and dairy-related producers to prepare “emergency management plans” showing how they would prepare for the ever-hazardous milk spill. Elements required in these emergency management plans include building “containment facilities” such as dikes to contain a hypothetical milky deluge, and training “first responders” to manage such an emergency.”
The canadians have a wonderful solution to regulatory absurdities and abuses:
Form a new bureaucracy to regulate the regulatory bureaucracies. Can you imagine all the forms, CannyDan?
And I am going to note that that is one more bullshit claim by a Right wing pundit:
Spilled Milk Regulations a Myth, E.P.A. Says and that the EPA actually exempted the Milk Producers from the regulations and that even the Milk Producers acknowledge that fact.
ETA from the second link:
I see that the claim in my link is somewhat inaccurate. Rather than the EPA planning on treating milk as crude oil, they opined that regulators might not be able to tell the difference between milk and oil under existing crude oil regulations. This prompted concern from the dairy industry who had to instead spend money lobbying congress for an exemption, which got stalled…
did they ever pass that exemption?
This is still a case of ridiculous, unnecessary waste.
“Somewhat inaccurate”?
The claim in your link is a lie.
The FDA looked at 38 year old regulations and noted that the language might be confusing. The agency notified the industry and the agency and the industry worked, together, to get the language changed.
You might want to still hate the process, but it does nothing to make your claim. Had Congress written the laws 38 years ago, the language issue could easily have remained the same and now we would be having Congressional hearings to make the same changes that the FDA was able to make without getting a buy-in from the lobbyists petitioning 535 different congresscritters.
Actually, I just discovered you are wrong and your citation appears no more than damage control.
The EPA hadn’t proposed and hasn’t proposed a straight-out exemption. It has allowed an exemption ONLY IF the dairy farmers use certain types of containers.
So it didn’t make dairy farmers build dykes and berms; it made them choose between replacing their storage equipment and building dykes and berms, AND IT IS REGULATING MILK under the authority of Crude Oil Spill rules.
So, they noticed that a part of those rules could be read in a manner abusive to the dairy industry. The Dairy industry, whom no-one had thought of regulating under crude oil spills, was brought under it under the guise of exempting them. Now the EPA controls what type of containers the dairy industry uses.
The EPA may make their press releases and say, “No, we weren’t planning on regulating milk,” but nevertheless they did.
Their requirements may be useful for protecting human health, but this is nothing to do with the environment and is already covered under the FDA.
That is, if the EPA can be trusted to be telling the truth in the following PDF.
WARNING: PDF
http://www.epa.gov/osweroe1/docs/oil/spcc/SPCCFactsheet_Milk_Jan09.pdf
The entire problem with the milk as oil regulation fiasco:
The EPA didn’t construe 33 U.S.C. §1251 et seq. (1972) reasonably.
The definition in the statute relevant to the issue is:
“(a) Definitions. For the purpose of this section, the term–
(1) “oil” means oil of any kind or in any form, including, but not limited to, petroleum, fuel oil, sludge, oil refuse, and oil mixed with wastes other than dredged spoil;”
What idiot thinks this means milk? Milk isn’t oil; oil is one of the constituent ingredients in milk. Because the statute also deals with oil mixed in with other substances, when it includes “oil mixed with waste” in the language, it’s quite reasonable to conclude that when it uses the language “oil” in contrast, “oil” means near pure oil. The legislative intent was well known to have been addressing petroleum oil spills in our waters.
But somebody at the EPA said, “Hey this is MILK that this statute addresses! Now we have to DO something!”
Tell me that’s not dumb as a box of rocks.
It’s true that some people misconstrued what they were doing, or didn’t understand. The EPA next gains authority over dairy by exempting them only on a certain condition. This condition is already enforced by other agencies and states, so I will retract any claims to huge expenses on the part of dairies to comply. Nevertheless, the EPA asserts authority over dairy spills under a law about crude oil spills, because it does say Dairy is subject to regulation as crude oil by the EPA if you do not comply.
This is a ridiculous proposition that a clear reading of the statute does not support, and it was still wasteful; someone at the EPA got paid to “fix” the “problem” that didn’t exist before the EPA got its bright idea that milk is oil. And the dairy industry did have lobbying costs; they couldn’t afford to ignore it with this level of idiocy taken seriously.
The guy who first said seriously “hey milk is oil” should have gotten fired, and we never should have heard about it. But we did, and government had to DO something for a problem that didn’t exist.
I think the definition of discharge is applicable too. Please note that it doesn’t say how much volume is required for a “spill” so any spill no matter how minute is supposedly covered.
If someone can read “milk” where it says “oil” or “oil mixed with waste” I’d be afraid they’d also say sloshing the bucket is a spill.
(2) "discharge" includes, but is not limited to, any spilling, leaking, pumping, pouring, emitting, emptying or dumping, but excludes (A) discharges in compliance with a permit under section 402 of this Act [42 USCS § 1342], (B) discharges resulting from circumstances identified and reviewed and made a part of the public record with respect to a permit issued or modified under section 402 of this Act [42 USCS § 1342], and subject to a condition in such permit,[,] (C) continuous or anticipated intermittent discharges from a point source, identified in a permit or permit application under section 402 of this Act [42 USCS § 1342], which are caused by events occurring within the scope of relevant operating or treatment systems, and (D) discharges incidental to mechanical removal authorized by the President under subsection (c) of this section;
Yeah IF some prosecutor was dumb enough to make a big deal about milk fitting the definition of oil and charge someone who committed a milk spill; assuming your talking about the alternative to regulatory agencies I support; that is, reliance on the criminal and/or civil law and the courts.
I will tell you that any number of prosecutors have acted on written laws in just that way. So removing the language from a regulatory agency and pushing it back to Congress does not solve the problem about which you are complaining; it simply means that a whole lot more people, backed by a lot more lobbyists, get their fingers in the process, opening the situation to a lot more intervention by courts.
Talk about unintended consequences, your solution is worse than the problem you think you are fixing. 
So are you arguing against our current system of congressional action? If they can’t write an effective law because of buy-in from lobbyists than why bother having them at all?
What you wrote sounds like you want to take law-making away from elected officials, rename it regulations (or rules), and have them written by unelected bureaucrats. And at the same time you imply that THAT process is free from outside interference.
Like so many in these threads, you are trying to have it both ways. You are taking the term “lobbying” and applying the negative form of it to the elected congress, while ignoring the valid and necessary form of lobbying which gets laws started in the first place. Without lobbying, how are the regulators supposed to know what to regulate? The lobbying doesn’t just make evil companies more profitable, it often stops idiotic ideas from destroying beneficial companies.
If you scroll back a few pages you’ll see how regulations impacted the medical device companies, causing a halt in RnD as well as job losses. It shouldn’t surprise you that those companies will have lobbyists whose job is to explain that to regulators.
And for anyone still interested in facts, wired.com has an interesting map showing antibiotic use by state
Antibiotics: Connected to Obesity, Diabetes and Stroke? | WIRED
That’s what the CURRENT set of regulations are doing to keep us safe. Without restricting movement into and out of the deep south, it doesn’t matter how responsible people in Seattle are. The current set of regulations make it very easy for people to get antibiotics, and does nothing to prevent misuse. So it’s hard to imagine how deregulation would make us less safe.
That’s the problem with libertarianism: lack of imagination.
You’re falling into the same fuzzy thinking that people who don’t vaccinate their kids fall into.
“I’ve never even known anyone with BLANK, why should I get my kid vaccinated against it?”
You don’t know anyone with BLANK because kids are vaccinated for it.
In your case, you don’t realize that the current system *with *antibiotic controls produces a world with few resistant bugs. So, you ask, why do we need any antibiotic controls?
Just because there are flaws now with regulation doesn’t mean that doing away with regulation will make the world better. The world is as good as it is *because *of the regulations we have.
Nothing wrong with it? Ahem, superbugs, Ahem.
The world is as good as it is…
Thank God the EPA acted when it did or we’d all be up a milk creek without a paddle.
What are you trying to communicate? I don’t understand what this sentence has to do with anything I just said. We have fewer bugs than we would without regulations.
Is having fewer bugs something you want society to have? Then support regulations.
How about making your point clearly?
But if a prosecutor does it, he is accountable to the people and can be thrown out of office. And before he can do much damage with it it also takes a perfectly idiotic judge to agree with him as well.
And this is only one aspect of the problems with regulation as performed by regulatory agencies as we know them today.
And here’s another problem with regulatory agencies as we know them: Lawlessness.
Here President Obama’s Moratorium on offshore drilling was overturned by a court that issued an injunction against it. The Obama administration appealed it and lost.
Obama ordered the EPA to continue with the moratorium anyway.
So a modern feature of regulation, at least under Obama, is that no checks or balances are possible, by the congress or the courts. They just ignore them and go on about their business anyway.
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/10/26/obamas-regulatory-excess-and-a/
Nah. You’re trying to build a big case for what I believe on the negative of what you believe. I just noted that David42 used a lie (that he did not create) as a prime example of what he opposes.
No. Federal prosecutors are not elected and judges are unlikely to direct verdicts unless the law is undeniably clear, (which any review of appealed cases will demonstrate is vanishingly rare), so your claim for a corrective is, at the very best, weak. If you are unaware of these facts, I can hardly trust your speculation regarding the rest of your thesis.
You might have a case to abolish regulatory agencies, but you have failed to persuasively make it, here.