Ronald Reagan once said “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” We’ve all heard it, but so many Republicans and conservatives even haven’t really gotten it. We talk about how “oh, small government is great, but we need SEC/FCC/EPA/whatever regulator.”

Regulation is a failure. Colorado learned that the hard way last week when the EPA caused the catastrophic pollution of the Animas river, spreading pollution to two states and poisoning the drinking water of many people.

Make no mistake: government caused this problem at the Gold King Mine. And while Navajo President Russel Begaye says “They are not going to get away with this”, they most certainly will. Regulators are unelected, unaccountable, and are even given broad deference by the courts.

Can you imagine the outrage if a private company had poured thousands of gallons of water full of arsenic, lead, and cadmium into a river supplying drinking water? The firm involved would almost surely go out of business due to massive fines and possibly criminal prosecution. Yet, this is EPA, so nothing will happen. In fact, EPA might get rewarded by being given control of the area as a “Superfund” project. Imagine that.

Every single regulator under Barack Obama has been empowered and radicalized. FCC, FTC, EPA, NLRB, SEC, and probably more I am not even thinking of right now, all have been acting to harm America. Even when we win elections, we can’t stop the regulation, because they bypass the normal legislative process in an extra-Constitutional framework.

It’s time to abolish regulators. Note that this does not mean descending into total anarchy. That’s a fallacy. We have options between a regulatory state, and anarchy. We can go back to a Constitutional model, where the Congress passes laws, and the Executive enforces them. So we can shred the Federal Register, but still have a functioning government.

A proliferation of regulators is one of the enduring legacies of the New Deal. Someone’s got to do something about it. If we don’t, the Animas River will be only the beginning.