The "hard right way" is sounding a little silly these days

 
 
In a wholesale attack, the rightwing CalWatchdog blog took an axe handle to AB 32, California's greenhouse gas law, and the California Air Resources Board, charged with fleshing out the vague act into a set of regulations.
 

While the California Air Resources Board continues to forge ahead like a blind bull in a china shop with its far-reaching climate change plan, the extent of the destruction that could result is beginning to become evident.
 
At a legislative hearing Tuesday, it became uncomfortably apparent that CARB officials simply do not understand what drives the free market. Unfortunately for California, the agency’s environmentalist supporters and much of the Legislature are in the same boat.--Katy Grimes, CAlwatchdog.com, March 20, 2013.

 
This sort of animal spiritedness (as Keynes might have said) rang clear clarion bells in 2007, but after five years of the consequences of profit taking by finance, insurance and real estate special interests, we have a notion of "what drives the free market," and how, on behalf of that motive, capitalism is happy to destroy the lives of working people and the environment. 
 
We should no longer tolerate the incessant babble of people who do not know their own interests, let alone ours. Why should any Californian not welcome whatever scheme the Legislature can put together to improve our air quality? And the Legislature is the proper place for that work, however badly it might do it. The free market is morally incapable of doing anything for the Common Good. That is the purpose of government and in an economic system that has so recently proved itself so destructive to the Common Good, it should be clear to all that government is the only force powerful enough to oppose it.
 
If only government weren't bought by the forces of Big Business whose antipathy for the free market is as intense as the antipathy projected onto CARB by the right wing. The big corporations, growing ever bigger want monopoly control over markets, not free markets. 
 
The question for the environmentalists is what evidence do they have that environmental regulation works, that it isn't undermined in conference with the "regulated community" (that abomination of corporate flak) before the final drafts of the regulations are even written?
 
Have environmentalists even identified the enemy yet, let alone figured out ways of fighting effectively in the 21st century? Now would be a good time because the public is in a skeptical frame of mind and is showing more and more signs of being open to change. They should be given something to think about beyond "the hard right way" to make the rich richer, which the corporate press is offering.