Lunch Break Read: EPA and IRS Prove Big Government Has Little Accountability
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
While you are taking your lunch break, check out this great commentary in National Review by Victor Davis Hanson, titled “As the EPA and IRS Have Shown, with Big Government Comes Little Accountability.”
It reminds me of the time David Axelrod told news broadcasters after the IRS targeting scandal broke that the government had “grown so vast” that it’s impossible for the President to know what’s going on.
If not Obama, then who? Who is going to hold all of these overgrown, over-powerful agencies accountable for their actions?
Social observers from Aristotle and Juvenal to James Madison and George Orwell have all warned of the dangers of out-of-control government. Lately, we have seen plenty of proof that they were frighteningly correct.
The Environmental Protection Agency spilled 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into a tributary of the Animas River in Colorado. The stinky yellow flume of old mine waste — rife with cancer-causing mercury and arsenic — threatens to pollute the drinking and recreational water of three states.
Had a private oil company acted so incompetently and negligently, it would have been fined billions of dollars by the same EPA. The company’s top executives might have been subject to criminal prosecutions. The business’s reputation would have been tarnished for years. Just ask BP officials what the Obama administration did to the corporation after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico.
But who will police the green police at the EPA?
When EPA administrator Gina McCarthy promises that the agency will take “full responsibility,” what does that tired banality mean? Will she resign? Will bureaucrats responsible for the toxic spill face fines and jail sentences? Will residents be able to sue McCarthy and her subordinates for diminishing their quality of life? Will the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund rush to federal court to file briefs?
Read the rest at the National Review here.
