Translation, you’re the kind of person there’s no point having a discussion with.
All I will say here, Magiver, is that it’s plainly evident that you’ve made no effort to support your claim that the EPA has become some kind of counterproductive bureaucracy, and are now seemingly intent on avoiding the question.
There seems little doubt that conservatives largely oppose the EPA simply because they oppose government regulation and consider it an obstacle to maximizing their profits, and they don’t give a damn about the environment when it comes to profits. A good example of this is the Koch brothers, among the biggest contributors and funding organizers for conservative campaigns and causes, among the most virulent anti-government extremists, and their family conglomerate, Koch Industries, has been guilty of some of the worst environmental transgressions in history and subject to some of the biggest fines ever imposed for environmental damage and risks to public health.
Aren’t you the one who spent pages and pages ranting about how electric cars were terrible because they cost too much and didn’t have range?
:searches:
Yeah, looks like that was you. I remember that conversation. 
i hear that California is now using lithium-ion batteries for power grid storage—which even I find very weird, but there you go. The future has arrived, I suspect.
Is this why it abandoned the study of global warming under Bush, something that definitely happened and which is not both what one would expect given your statements and exactly the opposite of what happened?
To be fair: coal plants are fucking awful for the environment, and any EPA that didn’t go after them would be failing its primary task of protecting the environment. But as others have pointed out…
This is a coincidence; coal has been eating a lot more shit from Natural Gas than from the EPA.
This would be a much more convincing argument if it weren’t for the fact that it is all too often the conservatives who are abusing it.
Maybe by ‘smaller government’ what they mean is government without all those inconvenient liberals.
Grover Norquist gave the game up a generation ago. The idea is that government can be drowned in a fat man’s bathtub. USA Movement Conservatives want a smaller, weaker government so they can more easily imagine a plan to destroy it, overthrow it, and set themselves up as filibuster kings.
Granted, that’s not conservative at all, but insistently using a name that’s the opposite of what you are is useful politically.
Sounds like all the more reason for liberals to adopt a small-government position.
The people you call liberals include those who want a government big enough to serve a big country, and not small enough to be assassinated by an anarcho-capitalist crank like Grover Norquist.
What, because we can’t expect your side of the aisle not to chuck all the toys out of the pram at the first possible junction, we’re supposed to give up on the many valuable and useful things the government needs a certain size to be able to do?
This is like a parent saying that a responsible, well-behaved kid can’t have an airsoft gun because they’ll force him to share it with his brother who has ADHD and who will inevitably put his own eye out or worse. Except that in this case, we’re talking about things like anti-pollution measures or the ability to provide economic stimulus, or respond reasonably to disasters, or <insert thing the government does that conservatives can’t be trusted to do when it’s needed here>. I think education will probably be next, given the wide conservative support for Betsy “literally doesn’t know the first thing about her fucking job except for that she hopes it doesn’t exist soon” DeVos.
No, because political arguments regardless of ideology shouldn’t engage in those kinds of meaningless polemics. Whether a government is “small” or “big” isn’t even remotely a meaningful or useful metric. The “small government” mantra seems to be a smokescreen used by many conservatives to try to justify the otherwise unjustifiable for the unrestrained benefit of private enterprise and a wealthy plutocracy without any regard whatsoever for the interests of society at large.
When you can’t justify gutting environmental regulations – because other countries more effectively protect the environment and still have strong economies – just invoke the magic mantra of “small government”. When you can’t justify keeping the government out of public health insurance despite the clear evidence that other countries implement universal systems at far lower cost and higher effectiveness than anything a fragmented private sector could ever do, and instead you want to protect a self-serving, dysfunctional profiteering private sector – just invoke the magic mantra of “small government”!
The “small government” mantra works wonderfully well when an ideology dedicated to relentlessly promoting unbridled private enterprise against the public interest is left with no factual argument to stand on, and is faced with insurmountable counter-examples from the rest of the industrialized world. (If the going gets really tough, try the double-whammy of “small government” and “American exceptionalism”!)
But in fact the appropriate metric for judging government is not its “smallness” or “bigness”, but its competence and effectiveness at achieving the kinds of basic societal goals that most reasonable people can agree on. And that should cut across all ideologies that embrace a reasonable view of what constitutes a free and just society. And that includes – to get back to the immediate topic – a society in which people aren’t dying of preventable cancers and respiratory and other diseases from rampant pollution of our air, water, and land, or the effects of climate change.
This is amazingly well put. Bravo.
Part of the Right’s disdain I believe is part of the state’s rights argument. My state (Colorado) loves fracking, now suppose the EPA decides to limit fracking. You would have a huge uproar over how the Feds are interfering with Colorado’s sovereignty.
It’s more like a parent of a child with a multiple-personality-disorder telling that child they can’t have an airsoft gun because he’ll inevitably put his own eye out or worse.
I’m simply suggesting that if you believe / agree with “Any time power is given to a government it is subject to abuse” then you should be selective and cautious about which power(s) you give to government.
For example, if you don’t think the President should be able to have his Cabinet nominees confirmed with a bare majority of 50 Senators + 1 Vice Presidential tie-breaker vote, maybe you shouldn’t give that power to them. If your (generic you, not BPC specifically) dumbass majority leader did that a few years ago, don’t bitch to me about the results when the shoe is on the other foot, because IDGAF.
So, putting in Trump is punishing us for Obama? Uh, why do you have to drink contaminated water to punish us?
I’m not following your contaminated water analogy.
The thing is, any time power is withheld from a government it is also subject to abuse. Namely, by non-government entities who can exploit their superior strength and power relative to individuals and to weakened government.
The choice is not between giving power to a government and remaining free of intrusion and tyranny. The choice is between risking intrusion and tyranny by government and risking intrusion and tyranny by corporations, crime organizations, religious autocrats, local “bosses”, etc. And/or, in many cases, just plain old crippling instability and insecurity caused by the lack of a uniform regulatory framework and the consequent proliferation of inefficient and unreliable practices.
Mind you, that’s not to say that the government ought to be in charge of everything. Every choice involves trade-offs, and sometimes the risk of abuse of power by government is worse than the risk of abuse of power by non-government actors that weakened government isn’t able to restrain.
But not always. Don’t try to kid us that “small government” necessarily means greater freedom.
The government won’t be a smidge smaller in 2020 than it is now, any more than Goldman-Sachs executives aren’t part of Trump’s ‘drain the swamp’ Cabinet, or that a member of the NSC isn’t a white supremacist anarchist.
What do you not get about bait-and-switch?
If you bothered to read my opinion about electric cars you’d know I’m excited about them and think they are the future. You’d also know I think this will happen when battery technology produces a fast-charge battery. People will naturally gravitate toward a car that has lots of power off the line with the potential for less maintenance.
You can’t be suggesting that conservatives advance their political agenda when in power.
A political agenda to advance personal profit at the expense of practically everyone else. That’s what wolfpup is decrying.