Since President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1968 to investigate pollution, the agency has become large, bureaucratic, and abusive, and now has the power to control the life and property of every citizen. As the author notes, “Today, there is not a man, woman or child in America whose life is not in danger of being destroyed by some government agency that has declared an action of theirs to be in violation of some regulation.”(1)

Beat The Devil examines this recent American tragedy through two approaches. The first highlights the nature of the problem by listing several striking examples of federal and state agency abuse of power, and then details a plan one can use for defense during an inspection. The second approach describes how “enabling” legislation has been passed by using false research and scientific fraud, by promoting hate and fear, and by using the media to sensationalize and promote emotional blackmail. It also proposes changes to the system, so that actions taken for the “public” good are paid for by the public, and so that the creator of a real public nuisance will pay for it. The author believes that this can be accomplished through the political process (by voting, petitioning Congress, and influencing judicial appointments).

The Constitution was set up for one purpose: to protect the individual from the tyranny of government. Over the last 200 years, however, Congress has passed several million laws to protect us from fraud and from ourselves, to prevent us from being a nuisance to others (the “nuisance laws”), and to control the actions of every business and citizen through “enabling legislation” (administrative law). Under enabling legislation one can be punished for a crime one didn’t commit, one is not innocent until proven guilty, and one is not given a trial by a jury of one’s peers. Also, one neighbor can accuse another of a crime, and no investigation or trial is needed to find the accused guilty. To quote the author, “No search warrant, no search, no crime discovered. Guilty!”(2)

Defending against a charge of environmental violation will cost between $250,000 and $500,000. For defense, one either must prove the regulations were improperly enforced, or that one didn’t violate the law. Both are almost impossible to prove. The author suggests the best defense is to attack the agency and its budget using one part of the Constitution — the “just compensation” clause of the Fifth Amendment. The strategy outlined for use during an inspection includes using the words, “bring it into compliance,” establishing that the situation is not now a problem but could be in the future, and documenting that corrective measures are needed to prevent the nuisance from occurring. After the inspection, one next notifies the agency it has violated one’s Fifth Amendment rights by performing a “taking” that entitles one to just compensation. One can list any of sixteen court findings, including the following:

1. That police power regulations can destroy the use and enjoyment of property just as effectively as formal condemnation or physical invasion of property. (In other words, enforcing regulations is just as much an invasion of private property as physical invasion or formal condemnation.)

2. That government cannot avoid liability by claiming that it did not mean to take property.

3. That compensation is due even if the regulations are determined to be valid.

4. That the courts may explore the statute’s purpose, its operative provisions, the extent to which other means could have been used to achieve the same purpose, and the rights it sought to abridge in the process.

5. That the courts can exercise their independent judgment as to whether the action taken by the agency served a public purpose or was truly the abatement of a public nuisance.

6. That strong public desires do not support a violation of the constitutional protections provided under the Fifth Amendment. (In other words, it will do the agency no good to claim it is acting upon the demands of the public.)

7. That to avoid paying compensation, the agency must prove the nuisance is truly a public nuisance.

8. That an agency cannot violate one’s Fifth Amendment rights simply because it would impair the government’s efficiency to protect those rights. That is, the courts have decided efficiency, cost, and administrative convenience are insufficient reasons for ignoring or weakening constitutional guarantees.

9. Courts have rejected the government’s claim that its actions are exempt from the just compensation clause because it was preventing environmental harm.(3)

If every business or property owner being regulated by an agency were to file for just compensation, the agencies would be receiving between 20 and 100 claims per day.

Concern for the environment escalated in the early 1960s following the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Subsequently, the environmental movement increased in influence, as did numerous

special interest groups such as the Audobon Society, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Earth First. Over the past thirty years, these groups have consistently labeled businesses and property owners as greedy and uncaring enemies of the environment. They have worked with the EPA to increase regulation through fear and hate, scientific fraud, and mislabeling. For example, “toxins,” “carcinogens,” and “mutagens” don’t exist in reality without considering dosage. The EPA has exploited these terms simply to further its agenda. In addition, cancer has been portrayed as “a social problem with a bunch of bad guys creating poison that would eventually kill us all,” when, in reality, most carcinogens are produced in nature (not man-made) and most cancers occur because of genetic factors, such as the damaged P53 cancer suppressor gene.(4)

Some of the more radical environmentalists feel that all humans are enemies of the earth. One wrote in the Earth First Journal: “AIDS should be welcomed as a necessary solution to man’s overpopulation and destruction of the earth.”(5) A National Park Service biologist, David Greler, wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Human happiness... is not as important as a wild and healthy planet...We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth,....Until such time as homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”(6) Some environmentalists may be working to implement these ideas, and serious speculation (including a recent article in Reason magazine) exists regarding the possible development of a “Designer Plague” purportedly designed to cause an epidemic which would kill off three-fourths of the earth’s population.

Today the regulatory process is out of control. As the author notes, there are now enough regulations on the books to throw every property owner and every business owner in jail. Ninety-four percent of all environmental penalties ever imposed were imposed during the Bush Administration, even though the laws have been on the books for over 40 years.(7) Congress has never prohibited itself from defrauding the public, from prosecuting citizens based on its prediction of their future actions, or from using false research to support its regulations. It has assumed that we are incapable of making our own decisions about our personal lives, and that it must protect us from ourselves. Consider the following disastrous results:

• Twenty-six agencies are regulating one small chemical plant in Concord, California.

• Enabling legislation has increased construction costs by at least 50 percent, thus harming the poor and the homeless.

• Current government fuel economy standards will cause an additional 2,000 to 4,000 extra deaths and 11,000 to 19,000 extra serious injuries from using smaller cars to save fuel.

• All the man-made CFCs are minuscule beside the chlorine released by volcanic eruptions over the past 20 years.

• Burning fossil fuels accounts for only 5 percent of the global C02 emissions.

• Research money for breast cancer has increased 450 percent in recent years while that for lung cancer has decreased, yet far more women die of lung cancer.

The EPA, as an agency of the government, has been a monumental failure. Not only the EPA, but all similar government agencies, and the system of administrative law under which they operate, should be abolished. Beat The Devil provides the information which, if widely disseminated, will hasten this result.

References

1. Mackie RA. How To Get Government Regulators Off Your Back —  Permanently!, Concord, CA, Solution Publishing, 1994, p.4.

2. Ibid., p.243.

3. Ibid., pp.115-116.

4. Ibid., p.217.

5. Ibid., p.149.

6. Idem.

7. Ibid., p.5.

Reviewed by Jerome C. Arnett, Jr., MD, FCCP
Elkins, West Virginia

Dr. Arnett is a pulmonologist in Elkins, West Virginia, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Medical Sentinel. His address is P.O. Box 1926, Elkins, WV 26241.

Originally published in the Medical Sentinel 1997;2(3):93-96. Copyright ©1997Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).

(Beat The Devil — How To Get Government Regulators Off Your Back — Permanently! by Richard A. Mackie, 280 pp., $29.95, ISBN 1-885372-01-9, Concord, CA, Solution Publishing, 1994.)