Free A Big Fat Crisis by Deborah Cohen Page A

hundred thousand others. We can thank regulations, rather than the voluntary behavioral improvements of otherwise motivated individuals, for these healthier living conditions.
    Our view of the responsibilities of societies and individuals has changed dramatically over the past century. Today, we expect our government to ensure that the air we breathe and the water we drink will not make us sick. We expect the government to make sure that housing and buildings will be constructed according to a rigorous code and won’t be defective or crumple in storms. We expect our government to make sure we are treated fairly at work and that conditions in the workplace are safe. We expect the government to ensure that transportation is safe, to protect us from terrorists in the air, and to prevent bridges from collapsing and trains from crashing. Moreover, we demand that the government test the safety of consumer goods and curtail false and misleading advertising.
    The government’s role in monitoring the risks that individuals cannot easily protect themselves against is continually expanding. Our increasing demands on government are paralleled by our decreasing expectations of what individuals can effectively be responsible for. Everything has become so specialized and sophisticated that it is impossible for a single person to master it all. We expect the government to assume responsibility for what individuals cannot do to protect and promote their own welfare. In general, the populace has mostly welcomed these protections.
    It is true that many regulations today seem to be arbitrary or over-the-top, and certainly we don’t need any more of those. Yet what now seem like reasonable demands to remove animal carcasses from the streets, and to clean human and animal wastes from the public byways, and not to sell alcohol to children, seemed like arbitrary and unjust impositions in the nineteenth century.
    Coming to terms with the host of regulations I have proposed is not going to be easy. I have great sympathy for complaints against a government that seems as if it already has too many onerous and unreasonable regulations now that I am trying to build my dream cottage in the middle of a rural area. I have had to face and comply with what seems like a host of burdensome requirements by the County Department of Building and Safety. The house I am planning is relatively small, with a thirty-by-forty-foot footprint, yet I need to get a zoning clearance, a soils test, a flood permit, a grading and earth removal permit, a permit for a septic tank, a well permit, a water quality permit, a permit for electricity, a building permit, a traffic permit, an integrated waste management permit, and a fire permit. I must hire several licensed professionals—an architect, a structural engineer, a soils engineer—to sign off on my plans. I need twenty-two separate documents, and I have to pay at least twelve different fees, including a traffic mitigation fee, a fire protection fee, a school district fee, an acreage assessment fee, a flood hazard clearance fee, and fees for seven different departments to check and approve my plans. Personnel have to come to the building site at every step along the way to approve the progress. They insist on personally checking that all the construction follows the building code.
    I have had to change my plans dramatically and spend way more than I planned because of these building codes, which were presumably created for my benefit. Today, all new buildings in California must be equipped with fire sprinklers. Even though I must include them, I also have to build my house within 150 feet of the public street so a fire truck can reach it in case of emergency. Although I wanted to build the house as far from the road as possible to have more privacy and peace and quiet, approval would have required paving a road strong enough to bear a sixteen-ton fire truck and wide enough for it to turn around. This would have been