Regulations
Many regulations are passed to protect the environment. Matthew Syed wrote the following in the New York Post about regulations in England:
When you keep adding new environmental and other requirements to any project, you create a viper’s nest of vested interests that block, stymie and delay. This is why obtaining permission for a project in the UK is now more difficult than building it. The planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing ran to nearly 360,000 pages and cost almost $400 million, more than twice what Norway paid to actually build the world’s longest road tunnel. All told, more than $1.6 billion was spent before a spade went into the ground...
Such stories abound in Britain. The do-gooders wanted to preserve local wildlife, a lovely sentiment. What happened in practice is that $133 million was loaded onto the cost of a tunnel to protect bats from a rail line. The do-gooders wanted to burnish their green credentials, and ended up exporting emissions to other nations whose products they bought while their own industries were hollowed out.
There is a lot of opposition to artificial intelligence and AI data centers in the United States. The Democrats are capitalizing on this to get votes. There are lot of reasonable concerns about AI. What's missing is the concern about what would happen if the U.S. doesn't build those centers. Matthew Syed wrote:
In the age of AI, nobody is keeping watch on America’s behalf. You are the City upon a Hill, the soldier on the wall, the only thing standing between the free world and a future dominated by the Chinese Communist Party, a totalitarian clique which regards AI as a route to global supremacy and whose true nature has been revealed not just by the Tiananmen Square massacre and genocide in Xinjiang but ever more chilling control of thought and speech. It’s a prospect that is beyond any dystopia imagined even by Orwell.
John Stossel: The “Nanny” State: How Government Regulations Jack Up the Price of Daycare
https://nypost.com/2025/12/16/opinion/mamdanis-plan-to-seize-housing-beckons-nyc-to-utter-disaster/