First of all, for those who are going to scream that all those folks who are going to use the probable cause of yesterday’s tragic Beirut blast to push for regulation are politicizing the deaths of those Lebanese who died, please FOAD[1]. Your heartless clinging to your political-religious tenets is sickening.
The BBC, in an “explainer” on ammonium nitrate, suggests that it may be to blame for the Beirut blast:
Nearly 3,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate – taken from a ship off the coast of Beirut six years ago and then stored in a warehouse – has been blamed for the explosion that ripped through the port area of the Lebanese capital on Tuesday.
I have no idea if Beirut or Lebanon had regulations regarding the storage of dangerous materials, and it doesn’t matter for my purposes.
This is a graphic example of the advantages of a regulatory state. One of the campaign claims Trump will be making will be how he’s removed the regulations that have been “hampering” American free enterprise, if he hasn’t already made the claim.
Beirut is the back side of that drive to remove regulations. An ideal regulation protects something the governing entity, be it city, state, or national, considers valuable: clean air & water, health and lives of residents, that sort of thing. When conservatives complain about regulation, there are going to be two motivations.
The first is bad regulations: contradictory or ineffective regulations. Fair enough. Those need to be revised or weeded out.
The second is regulations that impact profitability. That’s the bubbling witches’ cauldron in the Republican Party’s heart, and this is why treating regulations as anti-American is wrong, because as most Americans will agree, placing lives at risk for corporate profit is not acceptable. Beirut just demonstrated what happens when regulation either doesn’t exist, or is not effectively enforced.
And anti-regulation is one of those tenets of the Republican Party that I fear is treated as a religious precept. If you have Republican Party friends, you often hear mutterings about how regulation is strangling business. It’s a lesson that is reinforced by party leaders.
It’s the ring through their noses.
So next time you are tempted to mutter about regulation, think about the Beirut blast, instead. Perhaps the regulation subject to muttering really is uncalled for. It really could be. But rather than mutter, think about how to build a formal process that evaluates regulations for appropriateness, rather than just dark muttering.
Contribute to the communal effort, rather than whine.
1 FOAD, an acronym for the old Fuck Off And Die. Reserved for use on particularly short-sighted partisans.
