By Chuck Warren
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has caused controversy by its consideration of banning gas stoves. In yet another left-right game of push and pull, the gas stoves are the new front of the culture war. In a classic example of projecting, one’s flaws on others, progressives are accusing conservatives of making stoves a front of the culture war. Nonetheless, it is true that stoves are a part of the culture war now, but not in the way progressives think.
The problem with banning stoves, and how it relates to the culture war, is the same problem as the enforcement of the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) way past the pandemic or Americans’ objections to how administrators are running schools: Americans are being told how to live their lives by people nobody has voted for.
Read that again: Americans are being told how to live their lives by people nobody has voted for.
There are many governmental organizations making policy decisions for hundreds of millions of Americans without a single elected person in them. Which is crazy since there are more than half a million Americans serving in elected office.
These organizations usually have certain mandates, which gives them, institutionally, a narrow view of politics. It’s not just inevitable but also understandable. The U.S. Consumer Safety Protection Commission’s job is not to worry about economic growth. It is to worry about consumer safety as seen fit by lifelong bureaucrats. So marginal consumer risks become the entire world to the commissioners, not because they are bad at what they do, but because they are good in their bubble.
These commissions can serve a useful purpose. We have them to thank them for improvements in clean water, clean air, high quality healthcare, and not dying from poor quality commercial products. But they aren’t harmless, either, especially when left to their own devices and given too much regulatory power.
Let’s go back to stoves. About one-third of American households, 40 million, use gas stoves. And for the sake of argument, let’s concede that there are considerable dangers associated with gas stoves. Yet it shouldn’t be the task of a few unelected bureaucrats to make a sweeping decision for millions of American consumers, as well as an industry that employs thousands of Americans. This is the mandate of Congress—and whether it’s the job of anyone is a separate and just as important question. If Americans are going to be denied gas stoves, the least they could expect is a public debate about it by their elected representatives, not a dictatorial decision made by a handful of faceless and nameless bureaucrats.
Yet the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, just like other federal commissions and local and state organizations, has been making decisions for Americans with little accountability from the American people and their elected representatives for far too long.
Again, the blame doesn’t go to the bureaucrats. It goes to the elected members of government for derelict their oversight duties, not just any elected members, but Republicans.
It is a truism that Democrats are the party of government. So, it is not surprising that they don’t mind such bureaucratic intrusions. Actually, they are giddy about bureaucratic intrusions that fit their “government-solves-all” world mentality. The trouble is that the anti- and limited-government party, the GOP, has increasingly become less interested in pushing back on these policies in a meaningful way and beyond performative posturing and virtue-signaling that will appease people on social media but change nothing.
House Republicans are poised to use their new majority to investigate the administration of Joe Biden, as well as the president’s son, Hunter. Oversight is good. Making sure that the younger Biden’s personal problems didn’t corrupt his father and cost the American people matters. But such investigations shouldn’t come at the cost of rolling back the ever-growing and unchecked power of the unelected bureaucracy.
There is a vicious cycle corrupting our politics. The intrusive powers of the administrative state keep expanding, which slows down economic growth and creates resentment among Americans, leading them to elect people who are the loudest in their promise to stop these leftist attacks, yet spending most of their time in government to condemn the reach of government to Americans’ everyday lives without actually stopping it, which only enables the administrative state to do more. Responsible Republicans should put a stop to it.
Holding bureaucrats accountable might not raise as much money and get as many media hits as investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop. But rest assured, there is no shortage of Republicans volunteering to investigate the first son. There is a place for some clever Republicans to make their names known for protecting the commercial rights of Americans. And if making the country and the lives of compatriots is a reward, this will be far more rewarding than any other Biden issue conservatives are tempted to oversee and investigate.