We're from the government, we're here to help you...

Jane Galt on Asymetrical Information (yes... Jane, not John) has an excelllent post: Why Doesn't the Government Do Something?

And in fact when we get to the solutions to these types of problems, the ones where the government is supposed to step in and prevent the broad mass of people from doing something very bad for them, what we see is that liberals can recognize that the government is ill-equipped to handle them -- or at least the kind of government of which they are ostensibly in favor, which is to say representative, democratic government. So in the name of democracy, they agitate for agencies with the power to enact fiat rule with limited accountability, such as the EPA. This is profoundly anti-democratic, and can produce the worst of both worlds: a large deadweight loss, with little to show for it.