I am traveling for work, so time available for posting is harder to find.

I grabbed a WSJ on the way out of the hotel yesterday morning only to see that our nanny state government had thrown up all over the Marketplace front page. Among the headlines, the SEC sticks its nose into natural gas mining, Google is forced to settle out with the U.S. Justice Department for giving us access to life-saving, life-improving and discounted medicines from Canada, and the FCC asks AT&T to defend itself on why it needs to acquire T-Mobile.

Damn. Government intrusion in your life and the free market is EVERYWHERE. That was just the front page of Marketplace. This post will focus on the unregulated and unreported expansion of the SEC.

Among the headlines, the “SEC Bears Down on Fracking.” Fracking is the process that natural gas miners use to release gas from hard to reach places by injecting water, chemicals and mud into cracks inside the Earth.

My first thought as I turned the car AC to ‘HIGH’ (it is damn hot here in Florida) was why would the Securities and Exchange Commission be “bearing down” on a mining process? The SEC is used to investigate investment securities like stocks, bonds, sub-prime mortgages, credit-default swaps, etc… so how is it possible this government agency can get involved in how mud, chemicals and water are injected underground to release natural gas?

The article goes on to say, the SEC’s interest is in, “ensuring investors are being told about risks a company may face related to its operations, such as lawsuits, compliance costs or other uncertainties.” Well, there you have it. What company in the country operates without some level of uncertainties? I’ll tell you how many…NONE. So can someone tell me, if the SEC has broad enough powers to get involved in policing and regulating any company that operates with “uncertainties,” and all companies operate with some level of uncertainty, then does the SEC have any boundaries at all as to which companies they can “bear down on?”

The SEC now has NO boundaries. Every company doing anything has to fear the SEC and Big Government even if their financials are in perfect order because the SEC might not like how the company does whatever it is the company does to make money.

I’m not saying fracking is good or bad, but what I am saying is that the SEC has no business investigating companies that use this process, or any company that operates with some uncertainty, which is to say all companies. It just goes to show you that on any given day, just mulling through the paper will yield so many examples of how government agencies once created by Congress take on a life of their own, and become unregulated regulators that can operate with impunity cracking down on anyone for any reason well beyond the original intentions they were created for by Congress.

This is how Big Government gets BIGGER and BIGGER.

It’s only a matter of time before the Department of Education is investigating the fracking process due to the potential harm it may have on children who will then attend a public school. I mean really, where does it end?

Only you can stop it. You can stop it with a single vote. You can stop it in one day.

Categories: Big Brother, Headlines, Socialism

Tags: AT&T and T-Mobile, big government, fracking, Google settles out with Justice Department, natural gas, SEC, SEC Bears Down on Fracking