Results from tests with proposed lower water use for

Economist Dan Mitchell has a great post over at his blog today titled “The Regulatory State’s War Against Modern Life.” In it he discusses a variety of ways in which the regulatory state negatively impacts the everyday life of ordinary people. He says:

Lots of ordinary citizens, for instance, are irked that they’re now forced to use inferior light bulbs, substandard toilets, and inadequate washing machines because of regulatory silliness from Washington.

The latest instance of this is the proposed new regulation from the Department of Energy that, if enacted, will require that all new dishwashers use only 3.1 gallons of water for each load of dishes down from the current limit of 5. Tests by the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers indicate that such standards would reduce the effectiveness of dishwashers in such a way to totally erase the supposed efficiency gains. When they ran standard tests run with food stuck to dishes, pretty common in my house, they found:

some stuff that was pretty disgusting,” McAver [the manufacturing group’s head lobbyist] said. …“The poor performance that would result would totally undercut and go backwards in terms of energy and water use, because of the need for running the dishwasher again, or pre-rinsing or hand-washing, which uses a lot of water,” he said.

Not only will these rules make dishwashers less effective, they will also make them more expensive. According to the Department of Energy’s own estimates, the new standards would increase the cost of a dishwasher by $99, an increase that over half of all users would never recoup in energy savings. This is over and above the $44 increase in price that was the result of the reduction from ~6 gallons per load to 5 gallons in 2012.

As Dan Mitchell puts it, “Great, another bone-headed step by the government that will make life less enjoyable.”

When I read his post, I was immediately reminded of an essay by Ayn Rand from 1971 titled “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” which can be found in her book Return of the Primitive. In the first portion of this essay, she describes what it would mean in practice if environmentalist policies, such as those mentioned in Dan Mitchell’s post, were consistently implemented.

I will quote just a few paragraphs in which she describes what everyday life would be like under such policies:

You get up at five a.m., because you work in the city and must be at the office at nine. You always had a light breakfast, just toast and coffee. Your electric percolator is gone; electric percolators are not manufactured any longer, they are regarded as an item of self-indulgent luxury: they consume electric power, which contributes to the load of power stations, which contributes to air pollution. So you make your coffee in an old-fashioned pot on an electric– no, an oil-burning stove; you used to have an electric one, but they have been forbidden by law. Your electric toa ster is gone; you make your toast in an oven; your attention wanders for a moment and you burn the toast. There is no time to make another batch.

Miss Rand continues to describe the man’s day noting he is forced to use public transportation because private cars have been outlawed, see the sidebar if you think this is a preposterous idea that no one could seriously propose, lack of restaurants, lunchboxes, thermoses and assorted other changes. She then turns back home and describes what life for the man’s wife, who the man sees as the true victim, is like.

Your wife gets up at 6 a.m. – you have insisted that she sleep until the coal furnace, which you lighted, has warmed the house a little. She has to cook breakfast for your son, aged 5; there are no breakfast cereals to give him, they have been prohibited as not sufficiently nutritious; there is no canned orange juice – cans pollute the countryside. There are no electric refridgerators.

She has to breast-feed your infant daughter, aged six months; there are no plastic bottles, no baby formulas. There are no products such as “Pampers”; your wife washes diapers for hours each day, by hand, as she washes all the family laundry, as she washes the dishes – there are no self-indulgent luxuries such as washing machines or automatic dishwashers or electric irons. There are no vacuum cleaners; she cleans the house by means of a broom.

Ayn Rand concludes her description of life without efficient, modern, technology with this line, which the quote above from Mr. Mitchell echoes:

As you fall asleep, the air is pure above the roof of your house, pure as arctic snow – only you wonder how much longer you will care to breathe it.

Now I don’t believe we have, yet, arrived at a state of affairs such as Ayn Rand describes in the first part of her essay, but there is no doubt that this is the direction we are heading, just as Dan Mitchell points out in his article. How much more can statists claim we must use less water in our dishwashers, washing machines or toilets before such things are outlawed altogether?

Ayn Rand said in her essay:

If someone proposed to reduce you to the state I described, you would scream in protest. Why don’t you? It is being proposed loudly, clearly and daily all around you.

My hope is that more people will begin to realize where such regulations as those proposed for dishwashers, and the ideology behind them, will ultimately take us before it’s too late. Before statism makes life so unenjoyable that we all begin to wonder how much longer we will care to live it.

Here is an audio version of Ayn Rand’s essay, presented by her along with a Q&A session.