The Immorality of Low Flow Toilets

Rand Paul complained to the looters about invasive environmental regulation in general and that his low flow toilet doesn't work in particular. Now the hippies believe if they buy him a working low flow toilet, they're off the hook and he's bound to give in.

If he doesn't, it's allegedly not his toilet that's full of shit, but he. Turns out it's the hippies that are full of shit. Again, the hippies are trying to delude everyone, most desperately themselves, with green smoke and water mirrors.

Yet the problem is not clogged toilets or expensive, harmful light bulbs. This is not a mechanical, but a moral problem. Fascism — a nominally free system where all decisions are made and enforced by the state — is not OK, even if the toilets run on time.

And often, they do not:

Most waterless urinals however do not remove odor staining on the surface of the urinals, if not normally cleaned. Even when maintained according to recommendations, flushless urinals emit a fish-like odor that most people find unpleasant. In February, 2010, the headquarters of the California EPA removed waterless urinals that were installed in 2003 due to "hundreds of complaints" including odors and splashed urine on the floors.

As Ayn Rand observed, in the long run, the moral is always the practical and immorality always impractical. Even if you don't mind being told at gunpoint what to do.

Don't build another dam; lower the water in the toilet. The hippies say that for desirable innovation and progress, the government has to set the bar, and the market has to clear it. But what they do not tell you is what the producers would have done with their money, resources, and time if they had not been busy for years jumping through hoops, lowering the water in toilet bowls, getting those pesky low flow toilets to work.

Now, maybe the producers in question would have spent their resources going golfing, like Obama spends his worthless time. Or maybe these resources would have been allocated to finding a cure for cancer. (One presumes that Obama's and his taxpayer-funded leisure class' penchant for golf and madness bracketing makes them believe the former.)

We simply do not know. What we do know is that the decision was not made by businessmen, engineers, and scientists, but by the people's democratically elected representatives, whose concern is not the conquest of nature, but the conquest of men.

Those representatives in turn were chosen in an election where the sage and the village idiot have an equal vote. What's more, generally neither the people nor their representatives have any expertise in the fields where they presume to enforce their final solutions at gunpoint.

If water shortages do become a problem, like maybe in the Southwest, the solution has to be decided by the market, where the number of "votes" one person gets is determined by their productivity. In a democracy, every last moron gets an equal vote. In capitalism, productive people, being richer, have more power than unproductive people, and people who are affected by the problem, being more willing to spend money on it, have more say than carpet-bagging activists.

The first commenter who tries to refute that by anecdotal evidence wins a toaster. Only that no dead tree toaster will be delivered to you, as my contribution to cutting unnecessary "carbon." In the spirit of environmentalism, progress, networking, and replacing mechanics with electronics, I'll get you an e-toaster.

Obviously, democracy is not absolutely evil, and capitalism is not absolutely good. Even in democracy, the rich sometimes have more power than the poor. Even in capitalism, human beings make mistakes.

It's just that capitalism works way better than democracy. Do you generally get better service from private businesses or from your friendly neighborhood government?

In times memorial, there has never been a completely capitalist society. Even in the times of the Old West, which may have been the closest the world has come the capitalist ideal, there was a Washington, DC, and a federal government doling out subsidies and favors.

Yet in the past, the follies made were at least pro-man follies much of the time. The first transcontinental railroad, Hoover Dam, the Apollo program, the New York World Trade Center, the eradication of smallpox — railroads, dams, rockets, buildings, and medicines for which there was not yet a market. But if government-funded follies they were, they were nevertheless heroic follies.

From the follies the man-hating green government is sponsoring today, man won't profit in the foreseeable future. They're exclusively for the protection of Mono Lake and of hypothetical ice bears from a probably imaginary global warming.

If anybody wants to protect Mono Lake or the like, they should please spend their own money, resources, and time on it. I might even give them a twenty or so, particularly if that means I never have to see the government again.

And anyone who believes they have a human right to potable water without producing it or paying for it, or that anybody else has a duty to provide it to them free of charge: Go squeeze turnips.