I’ve finally figured out how to start my new lawn mower.
I just disconnect the spark plug wire, use a plug wrench to unscrew the spark plug itself, spray some starter fluid into the open cylinder through the spark plug hole, replace and reconnect the spark plug, and pull the rope. If it doesn’t work the first time, repeat the whole process.
This is stupid and complex. Worse, if I spray in too much starter fluid, the explosion could break the piston and ruin the engine.
For 30 years, I had lawn mowers that were easy to start. Just set the choke lever and pull the rope. But my new mower doesn’t have a choke. Two minutes a week of running my little push mower engine with the choke on would threaten the nation’s air quality, so there is no device on my new lawn mower to enrich the gas/air mixture for a cold start.
Why is the federal government worried about such a trivial factor in our air quality? Because if government regulators can’t find anything to worry about, they’re out of jobs. After they successfully worry about the big, important things, then they must convince the public to support their worrying about small things. Then they reach into our lives to regulate the chokes on lawn mowers just as if they were important.
This is not guesswork. I’m a former federal regulator. I’ve seen the system in action from the inside. On many days, my toughest duty was to rein in the enthusiasm of my fellow regulators.
The same air quality worriers are now targeting our livestock and poultry industries, supposedly because the farms’ aerial emissions might be triggering human disease problems.
These worriers are not physicians from the Centers for Disease Control, remember. These worriers are lawyers from the Environmental Protection Agency. They’re demanding that the livestock and poultry producers pony up millions of dollars of their own money to “study” the aerial emissions from hog and poultry barns, so the EPA can then charge them with violating the Clean Air Act.
The EPA says they’ve had”consumer complaints.” However, it seems to me that if there were legitimate evidence of human diseases being spread through the air from our farms, the government would quickly put up its own money to document the threat. I think it would be the physicians from the CDC coming to visit the farms, not the EPA lawyers.
I checked with a long-time friend in livestock research. He’s the kind of guy who actually measures the air quality around barns and rows a boat out onto hog waste lagoons to analyze the gases emitted.
He says there’s no indication of any health problems from the aerial emissions of our livestock and poultry farms. He says that there are sometimes dangerous bacteria around the birds and animals, such as salmonella and campylobacter. The farmers and the food industries work hard to ensure that those bacteria aren’t carried to consumers on our food.
But the bacteria can’t travel far by air. By the time they get 50 feet from the barn, the sunlight and lack of moisture severely degrade their vitality. By the time they get 100 feet from the barn, aerially-borne bacteria are dead.
The big staff health problem on most farms is choking on dust from the feed, which is about as local an air quality problem as you can get.
That’s why the CDC physicians are not the ones bugging the farmers.
At some point, we’ve got to rein in the lawyers. My lawn mower came with an instruction manual that warns me for several pages not to do stupid things. Don’t, for example, run the mower indoors with the windows closed. Why would I want to run a lawn mower indoors? Also, don’t start the mower near a natural gas leak. Do these pages really make us safer?
Does spending more and more tax money on more and more government lawyers automatically make us safer and life more enjoyable?
At some point. . .
