Dismantle OSHA to Protect American Business
The fourth branch of government: an unofficial term for the collection of federal regulatory agencies that impose fascist, centralized control over every aspect of our lives. Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute equates it to the Deep State, and adds a befitting if gory aspect, calling it the “headless” fourth branch of government. In a 2019 Mises Wire article, McMaken quotes Garet Garrett’s book Ex America:
These agencies have built up a large body of administrative law which the people are obliged to obey. And not only do they make their own laws; they enforce their own laws, acting as prosecutor, jury and judge; an appeal from their decisions to the regular courts is difficult.… Thus the Constitutional separation of the three governmental powers, namely, the legislative, the executive and the judicial is entirely lost.
The Lincoln administration spawned this hydra in 1862 with establishment of the fledgling U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), now one of the largest of the 15 federal departments that are part of what should be the smallest branch of government, the executive. Today, the USDA hamstrings our farmers, our food supply, and rural development. Likewise, the Department of Energy, established in 1977, has been stifling science and innovation and burning taxpayer dollars on the altar of environmentalism. And since 1913, the Department of Labor (DOL) has aimed its guns at American business.
President Richard Nixon expanded DOL’s control in 1970, when he added to its list of agencies OSHA — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Proponents argued that personal injuries and illnesses related to workplace environments imposed a hindrance to interstate commerce. Decreased production, lost wages, and increasing medical expenses were other excuses for stripping away individual companies’ constitutionally protected freedoms and imposing bureaucratic fascism.
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