May 29, 2023

When candidates run for public office — local, state, or federal — they campaign on some careful blend of their résumés, their personalities, and their political issues.

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Thus it has always been, and thus it will always be, in a republic.  “Vote for me because I have the experience to do it well,” or “Vote for me because I’m so much like you, I’ll represent your interests,” or “Vote for me because we agree on these twenty or thirty specific issues.”

But there is something going on that we don’t usually expect, and while it’s been in process for a century now, it’s become blatant only for the past decade or so, and that’s the growth of a regulatory state that virtually no candidate ever really campaigns on: the incredibly intrusive growth of the picky, micromanaging regulatory state.

I’ll begin with a personal example.

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I bought a house 20 years ago that came with a large wooden deck, about 25’x20′.  After a few years of experimenting, I found a solid oil deck stain that I loved working with, and I enjoyed several years of success using it.  Then, several years ago, I couldn’t find it anymore — the manufacturer had stopped manufacturing it — so I bought another brand of “oil deck stain” (the most expensive one, to be safe), and to say that my results were lousy would be putting it mildly.

We went from a product that applied easily, permeated the wood quickly, and lasted nicely without ever peeling…to a product that’s much harder to apply, takes a week to dry, peels the same season, and needs to be redone more frequently.

So I started investigating why, and I learned that it was because of a growing effort, state by state, to ban real oil deck stains at the state level, through the implementation of what they call “low-VOC” regulations.  Manufacturers are forced to either change their formulas to meet these regulations or make their products available in ever fewer states.

When this all commenced, one could drive to another state where his favorite products were still sold.

Advocates of federalism would instinctively say this is a good thing; it’s the “laboratories of democracy” theory, where some states would be rewarded for sanity and others would be punished by the market for their statist policies.  But there’s a problem with this theory.

We live in a national economy, and if a chemical company can’t legally sell its product in every state, or at least in almost every state, the math just won’t work anymore, and it will abandon the product, limiting its production to unrestricted products.  So it is that Thompson’s eventually gave up and stopped production of its wonderful “Deck and House Solid Oil Stain.”