Why Biden’s dishwasher regulations are a dirty joke

today consider another of the Biden administration’s aspirations: planet-friendly dishwashers.

The Energy Department’s busy beavers, with their unsleeping search for reasons to boss us around for our own good, decided that dishwashers use too much water and energy, there presumably being a shortage of the former and a stigma attached to using the latter. So, in 2012 the department issued regulations so annoying to consumers, the Trump administration relaxed them. That was sufficient reason for the Biden administration, on its first day, to order a reversal of the reversal.

Imagine how many government undertakings — in industrial policy, climate policy and elsewhere — might perish if held to the reasonable requirement of connecting facts and choices in non-arbitrary, non-capricious ways.

The Washington Examiner’s Jon Miltimore, noting the probability that many people respond to low-flow shower heads by taking longer showers, recalls the “Seinfeld” episode in which Jerry, Newman and Kramer are distraught and disheveled because they cannot get properly cleaned using the government’s preferred shower heads. Kramer (“There’s no pressure; I can’t get the shampoo out of my hair!”) solves the problem by buying on the black market a shower head made before the ascendancy of the climate scolds.

The Energy Department, whose Loan Programs Office has dispensed hundreds of millions of disappearing dollars in bad investments, has a lengthening menu of mischief. The implementing regulations are produced by people who went to law school to be qualified to write such annoyances. Amazing.

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