That Chevron decision looks right to us
No, no, this is nothing to do with fossil fuels. Rather, this:
The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a landmark 40-year-old decision that gave federal agencies broad regulatory power, upending their authority to issue regulations unless Congress has spoken clearly.
The old decision, overturned, was known as “Chevron”.
Not being lawyers we’d not comment on the legal reasoning. However, the basic idea seems to us to be entirely correct.
It won’t be a surprise to most adults that there are some out there who insist that there must be rules about everything. Nothing can be done without there being such a rule. As a basic idea we’ll accept that this is true about some things and not about the majority of life. But that’s not our point here.
Rather, if there are to be rules then who is going to make them? We would suggest that it shouldn’t be the bureaucracy. Which is what, essentially, the Supreme Court over in the still-rebellious territories has just decided.
For, by the very nature of the occupation, those who insist that there must be those detailed rules about everything are going to migrate into the occupation that writes and administers the rules - the bureaucracy. Further, when it is the bureaucracy writing them then the only consideration is going to be how precise the rules can be. There will be no consideration of, attention paid to the impact of, those rules on the more general state of the country and the economy.
As an example, say we had a bureaucracy concerned with rip offs in the financial markets. How people might be able to use the banking system nefariously and so on. The rules then written would end up being onerous, tight and very expensive. So much so that new financial organisations would find it between exceedingly difficult and impossible to get started - the necessary overhead of meeting those detailed rules is only supportable at large scale. Growth to being able to support it isn’t possible.
It’s even possible that right now we have such a bureaucracy with exactly such an outcome.
For there’s been no one with the overview, with oversight, involved in the creation of those rules. We’ve devolved the rule making to monomaniacs with a clipboard and no one at all is thinking about the effects upon competition, new firm creation and so on.
We could make similar noises about Natural England banning the building of 150,000 houses or whatever it was over nutrient rules. Or whichever idiots were allowed to change planning so that first floor and above window sills must be 1.2 metres from the floor. In isolation, to the monomaniacal clipboard wielders these might look sensible. To anyone interested in the overall system they’re madness.
The problem with the devolution of such rule making is that the inevitable trade offs - for all of life is a series of trade offs - get ignored for no one is responsible for the overall, only for their specific detail.
The rules should be made by politicians. In Parliament. We don’t say they’ll necessarily be better - we’ve seen some of the horrors in primary legislation - but it would mean that someone is actually responsible. So, we would know where to go to get idiocies changed and who to sack for having approved them.
Tim Worstall