Paul Rips Busy-Body Bureaucrats
Senator Rand Paul was in classic form this week at a hearing for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where he literally flushed an Obama energy official down the drain over draconian energy efficiency standards that subvert consumer choice and government regulations that destroy small businesses.
While noting that the Obama administration is pro-choice when it comes to abortion, Paul said it was anything but when it came to consumer choice. And then took Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency Kathleen Hogan to the woodshed:
You’re really anti-choice on every other consumer item that you’ve listed here, including light bulbs, refrigerators, toilets – you name it, you can’t go around your house without being told what to buy. You restrict my purchases; you don’t care about my choices. You don’t care about the consumer frankly. You raise the cost of all the items with your rules, all your notions that you know what’s best for me.
Frankly, my toilets don’t work in my house. And I blame you and people like you who want to tell me what I can install in my house, what I can do. You restrict my choices. There is hypocrisy that goes on when people claim to believe in some choices but don’t want to let the consumer decide what they can buy and put in their house.
…
I really find it troubling, this busy-body nature that you want to come into my house, my bathroom, my bedroom, my kitchen, my laundry room. I just really find it insulting.
All the arguments for energy efficiency, you’re exactly right; we should conserve energy. But why not do it in a voluntary way? Why do it where you threaten to fine me or put me in jail if I don’t accept your opinion? In America we believe in trying to convince our neighbors, but not trying to convince them through the force of law.
Paul, of course, makes the fundamental mistake of appearing to assume that Hogan and her ilk still think we’re actually living in America. You know, land of the free and all that silliness.
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