A law was made a distant moon ago here:
July and August cannot be too hot,
And there’s a legal limit to the snow here,
In Camelot.

The winter is forbidden ‘til December,
And exits March the second, on the dot.
By order, summer lingers through September,
In Camelot.

 

Richard Burton sang those lyrics on the stage, Richard Harris sang them in the movie, and my younger son (interestingly, yet another Richard) sang them on the stage at Topeka High School.

 

It’s an ancient dream, this desire we have to control the weather, to bend nature to our will, to harness the forces that affect our lives so that we like them better and they don’t get in our way so much.

 

In Camelot, according to the song lyrics, all they had to do was pass a law and the sun and the snow and the rain obeyed. I have to assume Merlyn figured in there somewhere, too.

 

The Environmental Protection Agency is working on regulations to limit the permissible amount of “fugitive dust” from farms. Yes, “fugitive dust.”

 

This September 21, 2006, ruling defines fugitive dust as particles lifted into the air by man-made and natural activities such as the movement of soil, vehicles, equipment, livestock, blasting and wind. The bureaucrats at the EPA want to limit dust emissions to 150 micrograms per cubic meter in any 24-hour period. As pointed out in Jim Suber’s column in the October 19, 2006, issue of the Wamego Times, that’s “the rough equivalent of one twenty-eighth of one ounce of water in two Olympic-sized pools.” Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has invited EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to his Iowa farm during harvest. I hope Mr. Johnson accepted.

 

Now, I’m not a farm person by anyone’s definition. I successfully raised some tomatoes for several summers in a row, and I held a bucket for a sheep to eat out of once. The creature promptly knocked me on my rear, and that ended any illusions I had about my suitability for the farming life.

 

But I have driven down gravel roads, and I’ve seen the wheat harvest from my car, and I’m trying to form some sort of mental image of this EPA pronouncement being enforced. I envision a business-suited individual standing downwind from the gravel road leading to the home of my friend who lives out in the country. He is holding some kind of contraption that captures, contains, and measures the “fugitive dust” arising in the area. The farmer harvesting his crop on the other side of the road has almost filled the EPA guy’s contraption for this day, and the dust kicked up by my car during my trip down the road pushes it over the limit. I am stopped, arrested, and led away in handcuffs by the Fugitive-Dust Police.

 

The EPA guy is being paid $45,000* per year, and his contraption costs $170,000*. There’s another guy just like him and another contraption downwind of every farm in Kansas and Iowa and Oklahoma and Nebraska and South Dakota and Missouri and eastern Colorado.

 

Courtesy of the American taxpayers.

 

It doesn’t look to me as if there is a distinction made between dust raised by human activity and dust stirred up by excessive wind, tornadoes, volcanoes, or stampeding livestock. A farmer whose cows raised a lot of dust because they were frightened by lightning would just have to postpone harvesting his beans until enough time had passed that he would not go over his Fugitive Dust limit. One small tornado, and nobody in three counties would be able to scuff their feet outside for six months.

 

The only advantage I can see to this astonishingly ludicrous situation is that it relieves me of the responsibility of dusting my furniture. When friends come over, I can say, with a straight face, “Yes, I know my house is dusty. But here’s the thing — if I dust, and take the duster outside to shake it, they’ll come and get me again. I’m already over my limit for this 24-hour period. I’ve been to the Fugitive Dust prison. And, believe me, I don’t want to go there again!”

 

*I made that up.

KsSmallBiz.com, November 8, 2006

Posted by Sharon under Libertarianism | 1 Comment »