A pole barn would not worry me much, but if I am buying an existing house, I want to know that building inspectors approved each stage of the construction. In places where there are no permits and inspections, construction techniques and materials may be substandard. If a person comes along and buys an existing house, which after the short warranty period begins to fall apart, catch on fire, etc., who is responsible? The purpose of permits and inspections is not to provide somebody with a paycheck. (I have seen that in China where a public worker stands outside every elevator door waiting to push the "up" or "down" button whenever someone needs to get on. They get just as upset if you try to do it yourself as those gas pumpers do in Oregon.) Anyway, building permits and inspections provide a valuable service by insuring that structures can be certified as adequately constructed according to code. When a storm destroys a bunch of houses that should have been able to withstand the wind, who pays for it? You do and I do, our taxes get doled out to people to rebuild. What if the houses were owner-built and substandard, and would have been stronger if permits and inspections to code performed? Do you really want to pay more taxes to replace those folks' houses? Just because something is not regulated does not make that automatically good. They deregulated the housing loan industry a few years back and what did that get us? A few multimillionaires gamed the system and became billionaires, and who's paying for the messed up banking and loan system that resulted. You are. Supply and demand affected gas prices, but deregulation of the futures market allowed speculators to make a killing off that too. Who pays for them to get rich? You do, every time you fill up. Keep reducing the number of FDA meat inspectors and what happens: results inversely proportional to the amount of salmonella poisoning due to E. coli. Deregulate airlines and you get horrible service and bankruptcies paid for by whom? Now I am not crying for overregulation, but no regulation at all is just silly. Politicians who say businesses and people should be able to voluntarily regulate themselves are just friends of the greedy who want to get rich at the expense of regular old hard working people like you and me. If faced with the choice of needing to buy a house and two houses are on the market, one was built by an owner-builder who never had an an inspection and the other received permits and every stage was certified as being to code, which one are you going to buy? Again, a pole barn, you can look at it and tell if there are going to be problems, but a house?
Now, as to wetlands. I consider myself a pragmatic environmentalist. Eden is gone, we're never gettin' it back. We can't keep every last drop of water clean, but I ain't gonna be the first person to move back into the Love Canal neighborhood and get my water from a local well. Offshore drilling, I am for it, but with restrictions 10 times stronger than ever before; if I owned a beach house, I wouldn't want a spill ruining my investment. Wetlands, you can't save them all, BUT I have some on the edge of my property with an extremely rare species that's protected. Allowing extant species to become extinct is problematic for more than just idealistic reasons. I am for wind power, but, if the big turbines kill every bat there is, we are up the creek 'cause those bats eat millions of tons of insects at night, insects that would eat all the crops on earth if not checked by bats and birds. Some of this is just practical. Another issue is that when a species goes extinct, you don't know what genes and biochemicals you might be losing. There is a tree in the northwest known as the Ewe. It produces a chemical called Taxol that is a powerful agent in chemotherapy. Tree goes extinct and we just throw away a great free gift nature gave us. In the tropical rain forests, drug companies have loads of researchers frantically searching for new compounds in rare and unstudied plants before they become extinct. The rare protected species on the wetlands by my house might contain something that might save somebody's life someday. I don't think we need to save every member of this species and every vernal pool that has them, but when a species is close to extinction or its low numbers throws everything else out of whack, then it pays to at least be prudent with some protection.
Personally, I am tired of extremists. I don't care for overregulation or for extremist environmentalism. I also don't care for those who call for no regulation (Let's let criminals voluntarily regulate themselves; we won't need to pay cops or prison guards anymore; that'll lower taxes) and no environmental protections at all. (In many places in China, you turn on the tap and multicolored goop flows out.) Why can't the politicians and business owners just use some plain old common sense and find a pragmatic middle ground that serves the greatest interests of the greatest number of people? Answer: cause the world is full of people who serve their own interests and don't care at all about the greater good. End of rant.
