An unforgettable bit from yesterday’s show:
We were talking about these new Department of Energy regulations coming requiring even more energy efficient appliances. Could Steven Chu, the secretary of energy, become the second most powerful man in the regime? Your house will have to be inspected for emissions and proper appliances, carbon footprint and all that just as your car is. And if you don’t pass you have to totally refit every appliance in your house until you’re in compliance, at your expense.
From the Seattle Times, back on March 26th:
“Federal investigators who submitted phony products, such as a gasoline-powered alarm clock, to the government’s energy-efficiency certification program found it easy to obtain approval and say the program is ‘vulnerable to fraud and abuse.'” A gasoline powered alarm clock was approved as a new energy efficient device. “Investigators with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said they obtained Energy Star approval for 15 of 20 fictitious products they submitted for certification with fake energy-savings claims. Two were rejected and three did not receive a response. … Among the phony products that obtained Energy Star certification was a ‘room air cleaner’ that, in a picture prominently displayed on the Web site of a bogus company, showed an electric space heater with a feather duster and strips of fly paper attached to it.”
I’m not kidding.
Now, we wonder why does government do everything badly? Yesterday I posed the question, how is it that in the private sector most of the things government does is a crime and people who perpetrate them are charged and sometimes convicted, but when government does those very same things, they are lauded with virtue and compassion.
(…) So here they are, approving phony, fictitious new appliances as compliant with the new Energy Star program. (…) So this whole program is bogus and it proves the point here, this is not about anything other than the continued transformation of the country, making us poorer and less free, pure and simple.
