Not Even If It's Cheap

Great day today, just great. Among other events, I agreed to go out and inspect That Same Damned Facility with the Odors again, because this time the... concerned citizen... called the US Senator, so the USEPA is sending two people driving 300 miles up here from Chicago to investigate, and they want me to show them how to get there. This will be about the 20th time I've inspected the place in the last three years.

Every so often something horrible happens in the environmental field. Some chemical plant explodes or something. And the cry goes out, where were the government regulators? Why didn't they catch this before it blew up? I'll tell you why. Somebody had an industrial facility in their back yard and didn't want it there, so they started a letter writing campaign and also a program of harassing phone calls to every agency and politician they could find, over and over again. And while they should have been checking the chemical plant, the EPA was three hundred miles away investigating a whiff of paint fumes over a back fence, because some senator (an anti-environmentalist Republican, more likely than not) ordered them to.

Not too happy about that, or the chest cold I may be developing. Then this afternoon came the real prize.

Some Honest Businessman came to the realization that a gallon of gasoline and a match was cheaper and faster than having this old house on his property demolished in a safe and legal manner. He called to ask me if that was allowed under the air pollution regulations. It isn't, of course.

He then explained, very carefully, that arson would SAVE HIM MONEY. I then explained, very carefully, that even if it was cheap it was still ILLEGAL.

So I got the twenty-minute rant about how some day they'll force government to let Honest Businessmen do anything they want to on the property for which they pay taxes. I remained calm. Outwardly.

How was your day?

Burdensome Regulations

Do you know what the penalty for nagelwresting is?

There isn't any penalty for it. Whatever it is, it isn't illegal, chiefly because nobody's ever done it.

It's good to remember that pretty much all our laws and regulations prohibit something that some lowlife scum somewhere actually did once. I can assure you, there is no Washington office devoted to dreaming up ways to prohibit things that nobody has ever done, or wanted to, or suggested.

We have burdensome child labor laws because Honest Businessmen saw nothing wrong with hiring children to work twelve-hour shifts in textile mills. And they no doubt praised themselves for doing so on the grounds of the economic opportunities they were providing. JobsJobsJobs!

We have burdonsome pollution laws because Honest Businessmen saw nothing wrong with pouring smoke into Pennsylvania skies until people were dropping dead all over town, or pouring solvents into Ohio rivers until they caught fire and nearly burned the city down.

We have fair labor laws because Henry Ford, among others, saw nothing wrong with hiring bands of armed thugs to beat or kill any "troublemakers" in his plant who thought the workers should have some say in what was in their contract-- and after all, it was Ford's property, wasn't it? Didn't he have an absolute right to control who was there and what they did there?

We have worker safety laws in honor of the thousands mangled in machinery or dead of black lung, brown lung, asbestosis, silicosis... and if the danger bothered them, they should go get a job somewhere else. Except there wasn't anywhere else.

Every single burdensome regulation the Honest Businessmen squeal about is damning evidence that the "enlightened self-interest" that is supposed to make Honest Businessmen behave in a responsible manner, didn't.

Perhaps we are smarter now. Perhaps we are more moral than we once were. Perhaps if we took all those regulations away, the Honest Businessmen wouldn't return to those old abuses.

Or not right away, anyhow.

Perhaps.

Proof Copies

The proof copies of Hilltown are here! Look pretty good, too. I haven't gone through any of them page by page, but my first impression is that Lulu.com did a good, professional-grade job.

The only odd thing, compared to most of my books, is that the paper seems smoother than most book papers. Probably this works better with the laser printers; that's essentially what they use, a sort of mojo Laser Printer from Hell. It would be funny if the print-on-demand book was distinguishable because it used a better quality paper than "real" books do.

I'll go through this for mistakes, to be sure. Next step will be to get my IBSN.

I see one mistake already. I'm vain enough I'd like to see my name on the book's spine. But that's easily fixed.

They did a good job. I'm very happy with it.