Posted on 01/17/2012 8:11:13 AM PST by WilliamIII
Justice Samuel Alito seemed none too pleased last week with the government’s argument in a case pitting property owners against the Environmental Protection Agency.
Four years ago, Mike and Chantell Sackett bought property to build their dream home near a lake in Idaho. After obtaining local permits the Sacketts began work, pouring in some land fill. But their work came to a screeching halt when they were visited by officials from the Environmental Protection Agency. The couple was slapped with a compliance order asserting that the land is subject to the Clean Water Act and that they had illegally placed fill material into protected wetlands on their property.
A violation of the compliance order could cost the Sacketts tens of thousands of fines per day. They sought to challenge the EPA’s finding in court, but were told that that they needed to go through a permitting process first, and only after the EPA moved to enforce the order could they seek judicial review.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Oops. I meant Justice Scalia.
Points out the need to get rid of Obama. Not only will Obama be non-accountable for the next 4 years, not only will he appoint ALL federal judges (and often the lower level ones are more important, seeing as how the Supremes take only about 1 in 100 cases appealed to them), but he'll also continue to appoint the top people in every single agency and department in government. I hate like Hell to say it, but I'll gladly vote for Romney over the current Destroyer-in-Chief. Besides, Romney's wife isn't a PMSing Wookie.
The only way I can see to challenge the EPA's powers is to point out their inherent lack of suitability for the charge of abiding by said treaties. Government agencies that derive their funding BECAUSE a species is in trouble are at a structural conflict of interest in restoring sufficient numbers for survival. That is our opening. I've been working for fourteen years to get somebody interested in taking advantage of it. So far, no takers. Hence, I'm in the process of doing it on my own with the faith that G-d will provide the resources when the time comes.
Samuel Alito was born April 1, 1950 in Trenton, NJ, to parents who were naturalized citizens. His father was born in Naples, but came here with Judge Alito’s grandparents in 1914 a babe in arms of age 6 months.
Justice Alito said of his hard-working father Samuel (birth name Salvatore): “He resented having to put down any ethnicity on a form. He would put down just plain American. He had earned the right through hard work to be simply called American.”
Something to remember on Martin Luther King Day, or any day. There are NO hyphenated Americans. We are AMERICANS.
If proving a conflict of interest were truly sufficient to justify the dismantling of a government agency,
inherently, there wouldn’t be any government agencies.
They, by definition (as we have recently seen with the ATF), need to perpetuate the “problem” in order to justify their existance.
True
Proving a conflict of interest is but one step of many. Having a demonstrably superior alternative, both technically and in the law is also necessary. I've found a way to meet both those criteria. Finally, one must have standing in the case. Got that too.
Any more defeatism for sale?
Good for you Mark! Godspeed, my friend.
It wouldn’t “look like America”, rather it would look like D.C., that “wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
Airport “gropers” cold be eliminated very safely and cheaply. All that needs to be done is the way that Israel did with their busses.
When the bad guys wanted to self-imolate and take out school kids etc., Israel just put packets of lard on their busses.
Ya think some muzzie’s gonna blow himself up and get coated w/lard? Then he couldn’t go to the land of 72 virgins. Poor boy. I think that they got the idea from how the Brits eliminated th babrary pirates...Wrapped the bodies in a pigskin...Fight over!
The government argues (EPA lawyer?) that the EPA normally gives pre-notice not to build on a wetland. Presumably they can’t prove it in this case.
Alito says, “So What.”
Earlier, Alito had asked what is the normal America supposed to think when they’re developing their home and some government agency comes in to tell them they’re in violation, that they’re gonna be fined up to 75 grand, that their back yard is a wetland, that they have to undo all the work they’ve already done, and that they can’t appeal the EPA’s order UNLESS the EPA FIRST chooses to sue them.
The lawyer’s response was that citizens normally get pre-notified about this stuff.
Alito says “So What!”
Does he mean any more than, who cares you didn’t give advance notice?
If you go to the Supreme Court link given on the cbs news page, you can listen to the full argument between the Justices and the Attorneys. The process itself is interesting, but in the end, the Justices accept the case.
They recognized the No-win catch 22 imposed upon the people by the EPA. One of the Justices remarked that it’s worse even than they originally thought.
This recognition may not help the Sacketts in the short run, but I think (what it looks like to me) is that the EPA is gong to have to amend their procedures. It wouldn’t surprise me if the EPA continues to try to schtick the $75K/day fines under the old law, but they’ll be forced to remedy their processes which will help others in the future.
Currently, there’s really nothing overseeing or regulating anything they say, or do regarding the environment. They have absolute power.
Hence, it is at the very root of the Democrat agenda.
I recall the story from a couple of years ago where a young 1st-grade teacher at a government school had her class, on the first day of school, dump all the supplies they had excitedly shopped for with their mothers during the prior week - - pencils, sharpeners, paper pads, crayons, etc., - - in a pile on the floor and then told the kids to help themselves to whatever they thought they needed. True story. You can guess what happened, and how many kids were left in tears.
But is there any doubt that this moron teacher is STILL a Democrat, a communist, and a true believer?
It is about dang time the Supremes get fired up about the constitution and rule of law in the US. If they keep on sleeping and playing footsies with the elite, they will have no constitutional Republic to defend. Then they can retire and stop betraying and pretending.
Once an economic factor has been rendered into a democratized commons, claims against uses producing transformation products can then be effected through the courts. These claims can be brought by anyone and focus exclusively upon controlling negatively valued transformation products without consideration of the total integrated impact of the contested use. (Since when did anybody sue in order to pay for a positive externality?)
As concentrations of transformation products in process outputs approach zero, minute reductions in pollutants can greatly increase the cost of treatment. As the cost of compliance consumes a higher fraction of the sale price of the economic good, the return on the original use approaches zero. Once the return on assets goes negative, investment in improving technology to reduce production of negative externalities becomes negatively valued as well. Few would develop new control technology because few could pay for it. If there is no return on the use of the asset, that use of the property will be abandoned, as it has become a zero-priced good. Negative investment return destroys the market value of the use.
Both claimant and agent are thus motivated to focus upon those transformation products that are most difficult to control, because it is those properties that are most likely to convert the use of the asset to that which they prefer. The fight between landowners, regulators, and activists then degenerates into increasingly trivial arguments regarding specifications, measurements, and enforcement that have increasingly large financial consequences for the owner. Remedial measures thus structurally diverge from an objective assessment of the total impact upon environmental health because that was never the claimants' primary objective.
Rarely does either acquiring interest consider the possible unintended consequences of their actions, among other reasons because they have little experience in actual operations and no accountability for the consequences. The legal process is thus alienated from its purpose to establish justice, just as the regulatory process is directed away from ecological health. There is little civic accountability for maintaining a successful balance among competing interests, indeed, very likely the contrary is true. Problems are sources of civic claims by which to control the entire economy, a motivational structure antithetical to the very purpose of regulation.
As claims proliferate, the legislatures and courts are overwhelmed with cases that are technical and difficult to prove. They rely upon opinions from supposedly disinterested experts regarding the impacts of transformation products. Neither legislators or courts have the power to enforce a judgement; that power lies exclusively with the executive branch of government. The demand for expediency seduces legislatures and the courts to default upon their Constitutional responsibility, to the only civic agency with relevant expertise and police power. Control of use and, thus ownership of that use, is effectively transferred to the executive branch of government.
When taking land out of production profits the financial sponsors of a claim, it is cheaper to control the target use than to compensate the owner or buy the property. All it takes to manipulate a resource market by democratic means is to buy out the competition by manipulating majority perceptions about the risk of ecological harm associated with that target use. The few who can profit by taking competing resources out of production then have reason to sponsor the investment in political or legal action. They focus the first case against a weak target or obvious problem (which is why most such takings appear as local actions).
Established precedent then extends the applicability of cited legislation and lowers the cost successive claims. Property owners gradually lose their ability to finance the cost of compliance or legal resistance. Absent a profitable use, the market value of the target use approaches zero. After repeated exercise of external controls, purchase of the residual asset value concludes any remaining claim by an owner.
When a rival owner produces a competing or substitute good, the financial advantages of such tacit property acquisitions can be enormous. For example, if a developer funded public concerns about the negatively valued transformation products of farming to render the use of farmland non-economic and ripe for development, the land becomes less expensive to purchase.
>Once an economic factor has been rendered into a democratized commons, claims against uses producing transformation products can then be effected through the courts. These claims can be brought by anyone and focus exclusively upon controlling negatively valued transformation products without consideration of the total integrated impact of the contested use. (Since when did anybody sue in order to pay for a positive externality?)
As concentrations of transformation products in process outputs approach zero, minute reductions in pollutants can greatly increase the cost of treatment. As the cost of compliance consumes a higher fraction of the sale price of the economic good, the return on the original use approaches zero. Once the return on assets goes negative, investment in improving technology to reduce production of negative externalities becomes negatively valued as well. Few would develop new control technology because few could pay for it. If there is no return on the use of the asset, that use of the property will be abandoned, as it has become a zero-priced good. Negative investment return destroys the market value of the use.
Both claimant and agent are thus motivated to focus upon those transformation products that are most difficult to control, because it is those properties that are most likely to convert the use of the asset to that which they prefer. The fight between landowners, regulators, and activists then degenerates into increasingly trivial arguments regarding specifications, measurements, and enforcement that have increasingly large financial consequences for the owner. Remedial measures thus structurally diverge from an objective assessment of the total impact upon environmental health because that was never the claimants' primary objective.
Rarely does either acquiring interest consider the possible unintended consequences of their actions, among other reasons because they have little experience in actual operations and no accountability for the consequences. The legal process is thus alienated from its purpose to establish justice, just as the regulatory process is directed away from ecological health. There is little civic accountability for maintaining a successful balance among competing interests, indeed, very likely the contrary is true. Problems are sources of civic claims by which to control the entire economy, a motivational structure antithetical to the very purpose of regulation.
As claims proliferate, the legislatures and courts are overwhelmed with cases that are technical and difficult to prove. They rely upon opinions from supposedly disinterested experts regarding the impacts of transformation products. Neither legislators or courts have the power to enforce a judgement; that power lies exclusively with the executive branch of government. The demand for expediency seduces legislatures and the courts to default upon their Constitutional responsibility, to the only civic agency with relevant expertise and police power. Control of use and, thus ownership of that use, is effectively transferred to the executive branch of government.
When taking land out of production profits the financial sponsors of a claim, it is cheaper to control the target use than to compensate the owner or buy the property. All it takes to manipulate a resource market by democratic means is to buy out the competition by manipulating majority perceptions about the risk of ecological harm associated with that target use. The few who can profit by taking competing resources out of production then have reason to sponsor the investment in political or legal action. They focus the first case against a weak target or obvious problem (which is why most such takings appear as local actions).
Established precedent then extends the applicability of cited legislation and lowers the cost successive claims. Property owners gradually lose their ability to finance the cost of compliance or legal resistance. Absent a profitable use, the market value of the target use approaches zero. After repeated exercise of external controls, purchase of the residual asset value concludes any remaining claim by an owner.
When a rival owner produces a competing or substitute good, the financial advantages of such tacit property acquisitions can be enormous. For example, if a developer funded public concerns about the negatively valued transformation products of farming to render the use of farmland non-economic and ripe for development, the land becomes less expensive to purchase.
This politically-sponsored dissolution of the Separation of Powers Principle, combines all three branches of government into one, that can derive power and funding by manufacturing claims on the use of property. The more externalities are regulated, the more power accrues to the agency to control the use of the producing asset to turn its use to corrupt purpose. When agency control is sufficient to alienate the interest of the agent from the democratic majority, the asset has then degenerated into a socialized commons.
The claims by which a commons is socialized are ironically often the same precedents as were used to extend the original democratic claim; i.e., by extending claims against the transformation products of the democratic use of the resource. With the legal precedents in place that were used to take control of the factors of production on individual property, the civic agent now has the legal tools to take control of ALL related private property. Control of the use of land is now in the hands of an agency that is alienated from accountability to the public claim for healthy ecosystem function. The agency instead serves the limited interests of the politically dominant, who use the power of government to gain de facto control of ALL factors of production.
History teaches that this is not a good thing.
A socialized commons is an evil to the environment because the resource is under a controlling agent with no structural motive to prevent or eliminate ecological problems. Quite the contrary, civic management of the environment not only doesn't work, it has every reason not to work. As ecological problems worsen and resulting economic crises deepen, the power acceded to government agencies expands!
Commons are factor inputs to all economic goods. The power to socialize a commons by regulation is the power to transfer control of ALL factors of production to government.
If the EPA had existed when this country was founded then the entire Mississippi basin, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and all States south of Mason Dixon line would never have been populated. Indeed the current EPA rules would have prevented any building in Washington DC. I suspect that the EPA offices in DC are currently sitting on drained swampland.
All of Northwest Ohio is a drained swamp. It’s flatter than Kansas ever dreamed of being.
I believe most of the agricultural land in the United States is drained swampland.
did they know it was wetlands when they bought it? maybe they should have fully inspect the land they bought and checked it out better before buying. It looks like they bought a money pit.
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