[Tom Joad]

Originally Posted by BlueStreak

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A0902T20140111

Yeah, no need for environmental regulation. All it does is kill jobs, anyways. Besides, the companies will do an excellent job of policing themselves. They drink the water and breathe the air too, you know

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/ite...ith-government

Let's take a look at the track record of private industry over the last 200 hours.

The giant retailer Target let it be known that it wasn't 40 million customers who had their financial data stolen, it was 70 million...and then it was 110 million...and it was also PIN numbers and email addresses that got snatched, too. If the federal government had allowed so profound a theft of financial information to take place, the good people at Fox News would be handing out the pitchforks and torches. After a third of the country was placed in peril of having their money stolen, thanks to the failure of private industry? Silence.

In West Virginia, some 300,000 people have been deprived of water to drink, bathe in, or prepare food with for days upon days now. Hospitals and retirement homes have had no water to work with, restaurants and other small businesses have been closed, because the water is so dirty you cannot even boil it to make it clean. Why? Because thousands of gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol were dumped into the Elk River by the magnificently-misnamed Freedom Industries, a private company that deals with coal.

But damn those pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington, right? Except it's the public servants in Washington who are running down the crooks who stole all that information from Target. It's the public servants who are cleaning up the mess made by Freedom Industries, and who are trucking in thousands of gallons of clean water to make sure the West Virginia residents affected by this get through it.

And there's this, too: the site of the spill in West Virginia has not undergone a government inspection since 1991, because government is the problem, so they de-regulated everything. And when it does go wrong, as it always does (ask West, Texas), it's the taxpayer who pays for the clean-up that is performed by the public servants.

Clearly, the decades-long push to privatize everything will lead us all to paradise on Earth.